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I am having trouble initializing an HDD that I have connected to my PC via USB. I'm stuck, and I need some ideas. Below is detail.
I am running Windows 10. The outboard HDD disk in question was previously the internal C: drive on this PC. I replaced it with a larger drive about four months ago purely so I would have more storage capacity; it was running fine at the time I replaced it, and it has been stored carefully since. I am using a USB 2.0 to IDE SATA adapter cable to connect the disk to my PC via one of the PC's USB ports. I've used this same cable to connect other HDDs to this same PC in the same manner successfully in the past.
When I navigate to ThisPC, the drive does not appear. I right-click on START, choose Disk Management, and the following is displayed:
I click OK, and the following is displayed:
I run DiskPart, and I get this:
The Event Viewer shows me this:
... and this:
... and this:
Note that the second to last screen says the disk was "not migrated due to partial or ambiguous match".
I have no idea where to go from here.
Easy responses would be "the disk is bad" or "the disk is old and no longer supported". I doubt that either is the case. The disk worked fine until it was excised from the machine and replaced four months ago. Since then, it's been stored carefully and not subjected to impact, moisture, extremes of temperature, etc.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
I'm not clear what you are suggesting regarding the Linux File Explorer. Are you suggesting I connect the disk to a machine running Linux, and try to interrogate the disk from there?
I don't have a Linux machine. I do, however, have CygWin installed on my machine. I could try to mount the remote disk from CygWin, I suppose.
Thoughts?
EaseUS Partition Manager didn't help. It seems to look for partitions on the disk, but only finds the one that we already know about. Strangely, it shows that partition as being on my boot disk, which it isn't. I can't say EaseUS leaves me with a great sense of confidence that it's actually doing anything useful.
I also think there's more here than just a missing partition. This is what I see in the explorer.
This suggests that in the partition the OS can see, there are about 410 mb of files. But when I double-click on that icon, it tells me the folder is empty.
Hmmm. You're right. OK, well, the disk measures in the 100s of gb. Not sure why chkdsk is giving this result. Maybe that's another clue?
It appears that only a System Reserved partition is being seen. I would download and run the free EaseUS Partition Manager and see if it can help to solve the mystery.
Hmmm. You're right. OK, well, the disk measures in the 100s of gb. Not sure why chkdsk is giving this result. Maybe that's another clue?
Sorry, did I say mb? I meant gb. To restate accurately: The disk is 550 gb in total size.
That's not what your chkdsk results said:
That's about 550MB, not GB.
