Key Solutions to External Hard Drive Showing as Local Disk

The external hard disk is displayed as a local disk and is not accessible? What if Windows recognizes your external hard drive or USB drive as a local disk and prevents you from accessing files? This guide will explore possible causes and potential solutions to this problem.

Windows recognizes my external hard drive as a local disk

"Hello, I need help in a desperate situation. I bought a WD My Passport HDD about four months ago and it has been working fine until today. When I connected it to my laptop it shows up as a local disk (F:) and the storage bar is not displayed. I tried right clicking to change the sharing options, but explorer.exe crashed. Any help would be greatly appreciated."

Due to its high capacity and portability, external disks are widely used in data storage, file backup and file sharing. However, sometimes you may find that your external hard drive appears as a local disk D (or other drive letter) in File Explorer and you cannot access files on the drive.

This problem is usually related to hardware problems, file system corruption, virus infection, drive failure, etc. In the next section, we will explore several possible solutions to this problem.

Solution to the external hard disk displayed as local disk

Before implementing the advanced solution, you can remove the external hard drive, connect it to another PC, and check if it is accessible. Additionally, you can replace the USB port or USB cable to troubleshoot connection issues. If the "External Hard Drive Shows as Local Disk" problem occurs on each computer, you can try the following methods.

Method 1. Check the disk for file system errors

If the external hard disk appears as a local disk and is inaccessible, there is a very likely disk file system problem. To scan and repair a corrupt file system, you can run the CHKDSK command line.

Step 1. Connect the external hard drive to your computer.

Step 2. On the taskbar, right-click the Start button and select Run .

Step 3. Type cmd into the open box and press Enter , and you will get the command prompt window.

In a new window, type chkdsk drive letter: /f /r /x (replace the drive letter with the actual drive letter of the external hard drive, for example, chkdsk G: /f /r /x) and press Enter .

Step 4. After executing the command line, you can go to File Explorer and check if the external hard drive is displayed properly and if you can access its data.

Method 2. Format the external hard disk

If the CHKDSK command line fails to repair the external hard drive, you may need to format the drive. Formatting the disk will delete all files on it, so you first need to recover the required files on the external hard drive.

To perform external hard drive data recovery, you can use MiniTool Power Data Recovery. It is a secure and green data recovery software that helps recover files from external hard drives, internal hard drives, USB drives, SD cards, and more.

It not only supports recovering deleted files from a normally-functioning disk, but also is good at recovering inaccessible files when the disk is in various error states. For example, it helps to recover data when an external hard disk displays 0 bytes, a hard disk displays RAW, a hard disk displays unallocated, etc. The free version of this software supports free file scanning, file preview and 1 GB of free file recovery.

After recovering the files, you can format the external hard drive without losing data. If you cannot format the disk in File Explorer or Disk Management, you can use the professional third-party partition manager MiniTool Partition Wizard.

The format partitioning function is free to use.

Step 1. Make sure the external hard drive is connected to your PC. Then, download, install and launch MiniTool Partition Wizard Free.

Step 2. On the home page of this partition manager, select the partition for the external disk and click the Format Partition option in the left panel.

Step 3. Next, specify the partition tag and file system, and click OK .

Step 4. Finally, click the Apply button to complete the disk formatting process.

Method 3. Update the disk driver

Updating the disk driver may also effectively resolve the "external hard disk display as local disk" issue.

Step 1. Right-click the Windows logo button and select Device Manager .

Step 2. Expand the Disk Drives tab, then right-click the target external hard drive and select Update Driver .

Step 3. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the process.

in conclusion

All in all, if the external hard disk appears as local disk D/E/F…, you can try the above method to get the drive back to normal. To prevent permanent data loss, it is recommended that you use MiniTool Power Data Recovery to recover files.

If you encounter any problems using MiniTool software, please let us know via [Contact Information].

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