Invisible Drives

I know this issue all too well, when I had my first desktop computer, I had a couple of hard drives installed but would sometimes have issues getting them to appear in File Explorer.

If you're like me, you like to have different drives for different things like:

C Drive for Windows only
Game drive for games and launchers
Media drive for movies and music
An extra drive for more storage

I have created multiple methods for resolving this issue and will link each to a section on this page

This guide will be split into multiple sections, each containing a different method to get your drives to appear in File Explorer

Troubleshooting

There are a few reasons why a storage drive is not appearing in File Explorer and could be solved with a couple of basic troubleshooting methods

Examine the drive connections to and from the system ensuring that the cable is firmly connected on both ends and there is no damage to the cable itself
Try a different port on the system if the drive is connected via USB
If the drive is external, try connecting it to another computer to ensure whether or not the system is to blame
Try a different drive on the same port or connector to see if it connects

If none of the above troubleshooting tips work for you, move on to another method. The next methods on this page will go more in-depth for showing "invisible" drives on a computer

Disk Managment

This method will be diving into the Disk manager program, this will let you set partitions of drives to decide how much space gets allocated per drive

Step 1.) You will need to open the Disk manager

Open start>search "create and format hard disk partitions"

Right-click Start>Select Disk Management

Step 2.) Once you are in the manager, find the drive that shows up as "unknown" right-click it, then select "Initialize Disk"

Step 3.) You will get a new window for initializing the disk, select the drive then select the GPT (GUID Partition Table) option

The drive will now be formatted and ready to be used, I recommend doing a normal format through file explorer and scan after this to ensure the drive is fully ready

Diskpart Method

This method will use the Command prompt to list all connected drives and format the one(s) that are not appearing in the File Explorer

I will be using a blank flash drive for this guide for example

The images for Command Prompt will be larger for this due to the small text but I will still have the click-to-enlarge option

Step 1.) Open the command prompt

Open Start>Search CMD>Run as Administrator

Step 2.) With Command Prompt open type Diskpart then press enter

Step 3.) Type List Disk then press enter, you will now get a list of all connected drives to the system

Step 4.) Type Select Disk "the offline drive" then press enter, I will be using Disk 5 for this example

Step 5.) Now type Clean then press enter, this will wipe the drive clean, erasing everything on it in the process. Once the cleaning is finished, the drive will now appear blank with the status set to unknown

Step 6.) Type create partition primary then press enter

Step 7.) Type Select Partition 1 then press enter

Step 8.) Type active then press enter

Step 9.) Type format FS=NTFS then press enter, this formats the drive and assigns it the NTFS file type

Step 10.) Once the format reaches 100 percent complete, type assign letter="choose unused letter", You will need to assign a new letter to the drive, I suggest doing the following:

Open File Explorer
See what letters your drives currently use
Assign a letter that is a few away from the latest

EXAMPLE: The latest letter my drives use is the letter G, so I will assign the letter K to this drive so it is not right after G but also not one of the last ones in the alphabet