Scanning and repairing drive on every start-up

Milennin said:

Melannin,

I do not know why you are seeing those Disk 3 & Disk 4 entries.
- I have never seen a 'Dynamic' or 'Foreign' entry in Disk mgmt.
- Disk 4 Removable, No media
- - If Disk 4 is a CD/DVD/BluRay drive then perhaps that's how they appear. It's so long since I've had an optical drive that I do not remember.
- - I did [Win7] see such an entry for a USB stick for which I had set the drive letter B: then unplugged but ones set as F:\ etc do not appear

Perhaps one of the other posters knows about how Disk mgmt shows Dynamic disks or optical drives.

All I know about Dynamic disks are that they are set by deliberate action for particular purposes.
What Are Basic and Dynamic Disks – MiniTool
Increase SSD space from separate physical drive - TenForums
How to Create Dynamic Volumes with AOMEI Dynamic Disk Manager
Extend Different Types of Dynamic Volumes - PWizard
Basic and Dynamic Disks - Microsoft Docs
- But, with my limited knowldge, I can only speculate that you once set a disk up as Dynamic and that is why the 2TB HDD showed up when it was physically disconnected.
- Perhaps those links can help you undo the Dynamic setup if you no longer need it.

Denis

Milennin said:

There is no option for me to initialize the 2TB disk (E:), so I assume I'm going to have to format it then?

Milennin,

But do consider my comments about investigating Dynamic disks first.

Yes, the initialise option only appears if the disk has never been initialised. The MS link I gave you takes you through the whole lot but your Digk mgmt diagram makes me think that it only requires formatting [re-formatting, I think you have implied].

I once had [with different symptoms] an internal HDD go 'Raw' on me. When I'd reformatted it, it behaved itself but I replaced it anyway because I could not bring myself to trust it again.

Denis

Denis-
This is what a CD-ROM drive looks like in Disk Management (4th Entry Below)
Also note my Disk 3 - that is my Epson printer. It is the USB port on the printer that makes it show up like that.
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The Dynamic Disk looked normal in previous screen shots. The volume showing with a green bar.

Now it seems to be showing another problem, as the volume is not showing at all. The Foreign label is new to me - I've never seen that before. No idea what that means.

Milennin said:

Okay, lol. I checked again after all that, and found my old, broken HDD was still in there, plugged in right behind the GPU, with the disk sitting all the way in the bottom corner, so I didn't see it originally. I guess I never removed it after using a file recovery tool to transfer over the files to my new disk after it broke. I took it out, and it's acting normal now.

As for the Foreign disk, I imported it via the Disk Management and it turned out to be my previous D: drive, so nothing was lost. Not sure if it matters whether it's set to dynamic though (it currently is).

Still not sure how my broken disk got brought up all of a sudden and why it was interfering with so many things. I pretty much forgot about it after I transferred over my files, and this was the first time it got referenced again.
Thanks all for helping me. Some of your posts went a bit over my head, I'm not that great with computers.

That's great to hear and doesn't surprise me at all. That 2TB disk had to be connected.
Since it was clicking and showing problems previously it was probably dying. And a dying hard drive can cause many problems.

Keep it disconnected, both power cable and data cable. Or better still, take it out of your PC altogether.

If you have all your data backed up, and you want to convert that Dynamic Disk to a standard "Basic" disk like all the others just ask. Someone here can help you with that. Conversion will wipe the data on the disk so best to proceed with due caution.

Cool.
Mark the thread as solved. It helps others.