HD Crashed!!!

[madphil]

I have a 4tb SSD Ext HD that has suddenly stopped showing up on my PC?? I'm operating Win 11 and it shows up in Device Manager but not in Disk Management?? I've googled and tried various options without any luck, it seems to be a hardware issue ?? Any help would be appreciated thanks and I can provide more info if needed.

[Homebrew101]

Try removing the HDD from the external enclosure and installing it directly in the case. Do you hear it power up and spin?

SSD drives don't spin

[LeifH12345]

If plan on keeping more data I recommend getting a new backup drive first in case you do get it working. Make another copy right away.

And not to be captain obvious but anything you don’t want to risk losing should be backed up 2-3 times

[madphil]

Try removing the HDD from the external enclosure and installing it directly in the case. Do you hear it power up and spin?
It has a power light on and I can feel it spinning if I hold it tight???

[srb151]

Easiest way to confirm if the issue is with the drive or Windows, is plug it into another computer and see if it shows up. If the drive works on another computer, I've had success with the following steps.

The issue I had was that Windows had somehow cached a disk ID for the external drive, so when I plugged it in later, it thought it already was connected and would never show up in disk management or explorer.

The fix was to manually change the disk ID on the external drive. I believe this is what I did:

- In cmd.exe or a Power Shell enter: diskpart.
- List all disks using list disk.
- Select the disk you want to change (most likely the one which is offline): select disk N, where N is the number of the list printed by list disk.
- Type uniqueid disk to see the current disk id. It will be identical to the system disk for cloned disks.
- Change the disk id of the old SSD by typing uniqueid disk id=12345678 The id might be a 32-bit id (like in this example, for a disk having an MBR) or a 128-bit UUID. Just change the last hex digit to something else.
- exit
- Disconnect the drive and reconnect it.
- The disk (its partitions) should now be recognized.