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PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT How can I make File Explorer recognise my SSD?
Q I originally installed two SSDs (one 250GB, one 1TB) in my mini PC. After installing Windows 10 on the smaller of the two drives, both were visible in File Explorer. However, since upgrading to Windows 11 the 1TB drive no longer appears in File Explorer. Could you suggest a possible remedy to this problem?
Eryl Jones
A This is a little odd. First, press Windows key+X to open the Quick Link menu and then choose Disk Management. What you do next depends on what you see. If the 1TB drive doesn’t appear, open your mini PC and check the connections are firmly in place, and haven’t come loose. If it does appear in Disk Management, it should be recoverable.
In the unlikely event that Disk Management labels the drive as ‘Not initialized’, right-click it and choose Initialize Disk.
Assuming the drive hasn’t developed a fault, you should now see its status change to Online and with all its space labelled as Unallocated. Right-click the Unallocated box, then choose New Simple Volume (see screenshot below) and click Next.
Next, type a number of megabytes for the new partition, or just accept the default amount – which should be the full 1TB (or around 1,000,000MB) and click Next. In the next box that opens, use the dropdown menu to choose a drive letter, then click Next.
Finally, choose the ‘Format this volume with the following settings’ option, then choose NTFS as the ‘File system’. Tick ‘Perform a quick format’ then click Next followed by Finish.
Hopefully, that should fix your problem. However, if the drive won’t initialize or there’s some other problem that won’t let you configure it via Disk Management, you can use PowerShell to carry out some expert tricks that should bring it back to life. Bear in mind you need to be very careful doing this, as the commands can be unforgiving – and a mistake could mean wiping the wrong drive instantly, with no way back.
First, open the Quick Link menu then choose ‘Windows PowerShell (Admin)’. At the PowerShell prompt, type diskpart (see screenshot above) and press Enter. Next, type list disk (with the space) and press Enter. Look at the drive capacities to ensure you know which drive is which, and then type select disk X (replace X with your drive number). In your case, we think this will probably be 1, so you’d type se
