How's it going guys, so this video is going to be pretty straightforward.
It's going to be about an issue that a lot of people, even myself have
come across and you'll probably come across at some point in Windows.
But it's got a simple answer, but if you didn't know how to fix it,
it's not really something you would be able to figure out yourself.
And that is how to fix if you're plugging in a USB drive and it
doesn't actually show up in Windows Explorer under My Computer or This PC.
Like you plug it in, it makes the sound.
So Windows is recognizing it, but it doesn't actually show up.
Now, there are a few possible reasons for why this might be,
let me go through them real quick.
And then later we'll go into the computer and show you how to fix each of them.
It's pretty much the same process for all of them, but basically
first of all, it could be that the drive works completely correctly
and there's nothing wrong with it.
But for some reason, Windows just didn't assign it a drive letter for whatever
reason, that's really easy to fix.
The second reason could be that it is either a partition style format that
windows doesn't recognize, like it could be ext4 or something that Linux uses.
Or it could have no partitions assigned to it at all, that's the second reason.
Or the third reason could be that the partitions on it are actually
messed up or simply the drive has not been initialized yet.
For example, this would be, if you just bought a brand new hard drive
off the shelf, you plug it in.
It might not be initialized.
That takes a little bit of an extra step, but it's still really easy.
So we'll go over to the computer and I'll show you how to fix all of those.
All right.
So we're at the computer and let's say you plug in a USB
drive, like I'm going to do now.
And I prepared a few of these specially ahead of time.
You heard it, it recognized it, but nothing new came on here.
I know I have a lot of tries plugged in, but no new ones popped up.
So what's the deal?
On this particular drive that I just plugged in, it's completely fine, but
there's no drive letter assigned to it.
So what you need to do is go to the start menu or just type in "Disk Manage".
And then it should suggest this, "create and format hard disk
partitions", and you click that.
I already have it open because it can take a little bit of time to load.
And you'll see this menu, which has been around since I think at least XP.
And what we're looking at here in this disk manager is at the top,
you see a list of volumes, and the bottom, you see a list of disks.
So volumes are basically partitions or divisions of whole disks, and at the
bottom, you see the disk themselves along with all those partitions in each one.
So actually mostly we're going to be taking a look at the bottom.
I think this has some more useful info because you can actually not
just see the whole list of disks and the partitions, but you could
actually see where those volumes are.
And also with the disks, you can see areas that are not partitioned at all.
They're basically blank unallocated, which are not shown in the volumes, because
they're not volume they're blank areas.
So both panels are useful in certain situations, but in our case, we're going
to be taking look mostly at the disk one.
So really what you kind of want to look for is down at the bottom.
And you can see here, this one is the one I just plugged in.
And you can see, it says healthy partition, it's a FAT, which is
supported by Windows, but there's just no
drive letter.
So anyway, what you're going to need to do is look for the actual drive you
plugged in, it might not have a name.
It might just be called disk 10, and you're just going to have to
basically determine based on the size of it, which one you plugged in,
where you can unplug and plug it back in and see what you want appears.
But anyway, you right click it when you do find it, and hit
"change drive letter and paths".
And then you can simply add a drive letter, let's call it Q.
It now has a letter.
And when we go back into the Explorer, we can right click and hit refresh.
And now there it is, it shows up working fine.
And again, this is a case where for some reason it just did not have a
drive letter assigned to it, but it was otherwise completely working,
didn't even have to be formatted or anything.
All right.
The next situation is where there is no actual even
partition formatted on the drive.
So we can actually simulate that by just deleting the volume.
And you can see after it did that there, it says unallocated.
So there is no drive letter or partition of any kind, and you can see up at
the top, it actually disappeared.
So this is one example of, if it's not partitioned off, even then, it's going
to be disappearing at the top and you have to find it down at the bottom.
And this is another case where if I unplug and plug it back
in, let's see what happens.
You can hear, it still did play the sound, it popped up a thing,
but it just is unallocated.
So if you hear the thing actually go off, it'll still recognize it, even
though there's no actual partition on it.
So that'll kind of clue you in that it's at least still working anyway.
So if this is the case and you plug it in and it says unallocated, what you
can do is right click, you have to hit simple volume, next, go through this.
You can just basically keep it automatic.
You can assign it whatever drive letter you want, let's call this one S, and
then choose the format for the volume.
If it's going to be a thumb drive that you're going to take out and
put in other stuff, I would probably recommend either FAT or FAT32 probably.
FAT32 if it's a bigger drive.
Or even another one that might be exFAT is another possibility.
You can name it, whatever you want, and then just do a quick format.
And then after a while, it'll show up and now it says that it's ready to go.
And again, pops up in the explorer.
Now I should point out if it says unallocated, but you're sure
that it has data on it, then it could be like it's corrupted.
In that case, you might actually have to maybe send it to like a data
recovery specialist or something, because I want to make it clear.
If you do create a new volume on a drive, it is going to basically wipe it.
So it is going to erase all the stuff on it.
If you create a new partition on it.
So don't do that unless, you know, it's like brand new or it's blank, or
there's not anything actually important on there, but if you're expecting
stuff to be on there and it's showing unallocated or something else, then
you might have to consult and get some data recovery specialist to work on it.
All right, now another possibility is if the file system on the thumb drive is
one that's valid, but it's not supported by windows like a Linux one called ext4.
So I'll plug one in here.
And of course, it's not going to show up in Explorer, but Windows
immediately will actually pop up and ask you if you want to format this.
And this is one where you have to be careful because if this was a
actual good formatted USB drive that was just created in Linux, Windows
is going to pop up immediately and ask you if you want to format the
disk, you might not want to do that.
So if you know that it's formatted in Linux, then I would not format it.
You'll just have to use another operating system to view it or a special software.
But here's an example where it says healthy partition and says 14.76
Gigabytes, but it doesn't have a name of the file system on here.
And I know it's ext4, because I made it myself, but also there was another
piece of software I downloaded.
So here's a program that has a free version.
It's called AOMEI Partition Assistant.
This is one that can recognize ext4 and you scroll down and you can see
that this Disk 10, 14.76 GB that was invisible to Windows, shows ext4 on here.
So, that file system and just Windows doesn't recognize it.
So if you know that there's nothing important on there, you could
simply delete the volume and then create another regular NTFS or
exFAT, or whatever volume on there.
Just remember it's going to delete anything on there.
So finally, we can move on to a final possibility, which is
this one that I specially made.
So if we plug this one in again, like all of them Windows will make a sound
recognizing that something was plugged in, but this one is going to look a little
bit different than what we've seen before.
So this one says, Disk 10, unknown this time, it says
unallocated like the other one did.
But if we right click it, it doesn't say you can create a simple volume.
You can't create any volume.
What's up with that.
This is a case where usually this is not going to be for USB drives.
I had to specially prepare this USB drive to basically trick Windows into thinking
that it's not removable, but this is
when it is not initialized.
That's why this is showing that.
So if you ever have a disk that is not showing in Explorer and you open the disk
manager and it shows unallocated, but you can't create a new simple volume,
look to the left and see if it says not initialized with this little symbol.
And all you have to do is right
click, hit initialize disk.
And then you're going to have to choose a partition boot table
or boot record and just do GPT.
That's like the more modern one, if you need it to be extremely compatible
with like ancient stuff, maybe Master Boot Record, but GPT is fine.
And then you just hit okay.
And now it's been initialized, which means there was a partition table
written to it and now it still says unallocated, but now you can see,
you can create a simple volume now.
So just be aware that, if that ever happens, that might be why.
But again, that's probably only going to happen for internal
drives, not USB drives.
I had to do a special thing to be able to have that happen on a USB drive.
But also remember that when I plugged that one in, even though
it was not initialized, it was unavailable, blah, blah, blah,
windows still had the sound play.
So anytime the sound does NOT play when you plug it in, it could be a
actual hardware issue with the thumb drive, where it's just like a broken
thumb drive, or maybe the USB port is not working or something like that.
Actually, there is a little piece of software that I'm a
big fan of called USBLogView.
This is from a website called NirSoft, this guy makes a whole
bunch of really useful programs you might have seen before.
Anyway, this one's called USBLogView and it basically let's you see a
log of anything that's been plugged in, or unplugged from your computer.
And this is really useful because sometimes I'll randomly hear something
it plugged in Windows, or it'll detect a new device or something.
And I'm like, what was that sound for?
Well, now you can go in and see what actually has been plugging
itself in and out, even though you didn't necessarily do it.
So it's just a good way to see if Windows is actually detecting it, or
something's actually wrong with it.
So yeah.
Now you just have a little bit better understanding about how this really
useful disk management panel works.
So I hope you guys found this video helpful.
Be sure to give it a thumbs up and like it if you did.
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So you want to not miss anything.
Now, speaking of USB drives, if you guys want to keep watching the next video I'd
recommend is where I was talking about different USB boot drives that really
everyone should have just in case of an emergency where your computer's not
working, how you can get booted up with those drives and get it working again.
So you can just click on that right there.
So thanks so much for watching guys, and I'll see you in the next one.