Secondary 3TB HDD not showing in explorer after W10 Upgrade


  1. Posts : 4
    Windows 10
       #1

    Secondary 3TB HDD not showing in explorer after W10 Upgrade


    Hello everyone! I'm Canas and after effortless googling for 2 days I seek your wisdom in a specific problem I'm having after updating to Windows 10.

    My setup before the problem was:
    - Windows 8.1 in a 250GB SSD with Linux dual boot
    - Secondary 160GB HDD (fs: ntfs, type: primary)
    - Secondary 3TB HDD (fs: ntfs, type: gpt)

    The 3TB drive was working normally on windows 8.1 when I bought it. After some months I decided to upgrade to Windows 10. After that, I cannot access my drive and Disk Management shows just grey options for the drive.

    Pic 1: https://i.imgur.com/TESkhTM.png

    After that I did a clean Windows 8.1 install again just to see if it was an OS problem, but now the same is going on with the management system. I used MiniTool Partition Wizard to check what's going on and this is what it shows

    Pic 2: https://i.imgur.com/Dc8kasL.png

    What I tried doing is to force a label on this drive with MiniTool (in this case, D:, but then when I try to access the folders in Explorer it says '\D: is not accessible, access denied'. I already tried giving me all permissions/full control in the security tab in various ways but none worked, it still said 'Access Denied'.

    Pic 3: https://i.imgur.com/o2dOfJ7.png

    The only way I could finally access it is by killing explorer.exe and then starting it again with Admin rights, but once I reboot the system, the drive dissappears again and I have to do everything all over (assign label with MiniTool -> kill explorer -> open explorer with admin rights).

    So here I am stuck trying to figure out how to access data that I could perfectly access without trouble on my previous Windows 8.1 installation. Any help would be incredibly appretiated.

    Thanks

    P.S: Before you ask,
    I am not trying to recover deleted data. The partition exists, and I can access it through MiniTool Partition Wizard (since it recognizes it as a active EFI Healthy Partition on a GPT formatted drive). The problem is trying to access through Windows Explorer to the data.

    Pic 4: https://i.imgur.com/ZcotSOv.png
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 2,799
    Linux Mint 20.1 Win10Prox64
       #2

    From the screen shot, your disks layout is a mess. The reason you cannot see the 3TB disk is it was set to EFI system partition which is invisible while your Windows was installed using MBR type disk and you have 2 disks marked as "Active".
    Secondary 3TB HDD not showing in explorer after W10 Upgrade-teskhtm.png
    Open Admin command prompt and type:
    1. diskpart
    2. select disk 2
    3. list par
    4. exit

    Copy and paste the text of the result then we can go from there.
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 4
    Windows 10
    Thread Starter
       #3

    topgundcp said:
    From the screen shot, your disks layout is a mess. The reason you cannot see the 3TB disk is it was set to EFI system partition which is invisible while your Windows was installed using MBR type disk and you have 2 disks marked as "Active".

    Open Admin command prompt and type:
    1. diskpart
    2. select disk 2
    3. list par
    4. exit

    Copy and paste the text of the result then we can go from there.
    Code:
    DISKPART> select disk 2
    Disk 2 is now the selected disk.
    DISKPART> list par
      Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
      -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
      Partition 1    Reserved           128 MB    17 KB
      Partition 2    System            2794 GB   129 MB
    DISKPART>
    With respect to the mess, you're probably referring to my Disk 1, which has right now:
    Windows OS; a partition probably created by windows 10 for recovery ; Ubuntu 12.04 ; Swap Partition
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 2,799
    Linux Mint 20.1 Win10Prox64
       #4

    Since this disk is a GPT disk so there is a 128MB MSR partition for a non OS GPT disk.
    From Admin command, type:
    1. diskpart
    2. select disk 2
    3. select par 2
    4. set id=EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 override
    5. exit


    On step 4, just copy and paste what I had to make sure you get it correctly. Once done, you should be able to see your 3TB disk.

    With respect to the mess, you're probably referring to my Disk 1, which has right now:
    Windows OS; a partition probably created by windows 10 for recovery ; Ubuntu 12.04 ; Swap Partition
    Disk 0 should not be marked as "Active". It's better to also swap the sata cable between 0 and 1
    Last edited by topgundcp; 31 Jan 2016 at 21:08.
      My Computer


  5. Posts : 4
    Windows 10
    Thread Starter
       #5

    topgundcp said:
    Since this disk is a GPT disk so there is an 128MB MSR partition for a non OS GPT disk.
    From Admin command, type:
    1. diskpart
    2. select disk 2
    3. select par 2
    4. set id=EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 override
    5. exit


    On step 4, just copy and paste what I had to make sure you get it correctly. Once done, you should be able to see your 3TB disk.


    Disk 0 should not be marked as "Active". It's better to also swap the sata cable between 0 and 1
    Thanks for that last advice! I did what you said, and the partition did not show, but this time I could assign a drive letter through Windows Disk Management Tool (previously i needed MiniTool to do that). I can now see the drive but I still have the "access denied" part. So any help with that will be appreciated too.
      My Computer


  6. Posts : 2,799
    Linux Mint 20.1 Win10Prox64
       #6

    Canas said:
    Thanks for that last advice! I did what you said, and the partition did not show, but this time I could assign a drive letter through Windows Disk Management Tool (previously i needed MiniTool to do that). I can now see the drive but I still have the "access denied" part. So any help with that will be appreciated too.
    Windows was not aware that a letter was assigned with Mini Tool, so yes, you'd need to assign a letter from Disk Management to be visible.
    I don't know what you did with Mini Tool prior to this, changed permission ? You can try to take ownership of the disk.
    Or since you use Linux, you could access the drive, copy all personal data files to another place then re-initialze the disk
    as follows:
    1. diskpart
    2. select disk 2
    3. clean
    4. exit


    From Disk Management, initialize it as GPT disk then format to start out clean.
    Last edited by topgundcp; 31 Jan 2016 at 21:28. Reason: More info
      My Computer


  7. Posts : 2,799
    Linux Mint 20.1 Win10Prox64
       #7

    Another thought. When you use Mini Tool to assign letter "D" to the disk then after reset the ID, you used Disk Management to assign the Drive letter again, are they the same ? If they are not, Windows might get confused causing the disk to be inaccessible.
      My Computer


  8. Posts : 4
    Windows 10
    Thread Starter
       #8

    topgundcp said:
    Another thought. When you use Mini Tool to assign letter "D" to the disk then after reset the ID, you used Disk Management to assign the Drive letter again, are they the same ? If they are not, Windows might get confused causing the disk to be inaccessible.
    Not exactly, on this reboot I did not use MiniTool Partition Wizard to assign the letter, just Disk Management. In any case, I managed to solve it by login in as Administrator instead of my user Account (which is Administrator too but didn't work) and changed the permissions to the drive from there.

    I asked to Microsoft about why this happened and got this
    It seems that during the upgrade, the default system user took ownership of the drive and therefore, incorrectly detecting you as a different user. This normally happens when there was a glitch during the customization phase of the upgrade. This is the reason why you couldn't access the drive.
    The problem seems solved now anyway, thanks for your help topgundcp, the id change was crucial for the drive to stop dissappearing after every reboot.

    I'd like to know where did you get that info or how can I learn more about this since every year I have a fight with partitions and usually end up using band-aid solutions with MiniTool or boot-repair.
      My Computer


  9. Posts : 2,799
    Linux Mint 20.1 Win10Prox64
       #9

    Great. I am glad you finally got it sorted.
    FYI, I do own paid copies of Mini Tool, AOMEI Partition Assistance & Paragon. However, Those partition managers are only good in certain situation. Since Disk Management has limited functionality but that how it is designed to be because MS just don't want people without knowledge to mess around with partitions causing your OS unbootable etc... and that's why they have "Diskpart" for more advanced users. So I would suggest that you read up on "Diskpart" commands. For example, Disk Management won't allow you to assign a letter to the disk but "Diskpart" would, you should not have to use Mini Tool to do it.

    In addtition, read up on GPT disk to know more about how it works. When I saw the 3TB disk was set to EFI System partition type then I know why it did not show up. Each partition type in GPT disk is identified by a GUID hex number. What we did is to re-assign the partition type to be: Basic GPT data disk.
    Last edited by topgundcp; 01 Feb 2016 at 05:17.
      My Computer


 

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