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I have WD 2tb external hard drive. It seems to be detected in disk management but does not show up in windows explorer. In disk management, right clicking on the disk partition only one option is enabled "Delete volume". I can't even change the letter of disk so that I can use chkdsk command to repair the bad sectors. Data is crucial. I really need to recover it. For reference I have attached the screenshot.

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Tetsujin
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Trushar Gavit
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  • "Data is crucial." …then just restore it from your backup. – Tetsujin May 12 '20 at 14:47
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    Does this answer your question? [How do I recover lost/inaccessible data from my storage device?](https://superuser.com/questions/241817/how-do-i-recover-lost-inaccessible-data-from-my-storage-device) – Tetsujin May 12 '20 at 14:50
  • It's a bit confusing to understand the instructions for me. – Trushar Gavit May 13 '20 at 12:59

2 Answers2

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I had this problem before. Try Paragon Partition Manager 2014, that usually does the trick and allows you to reassign drive letters without deleting all the data.

DLCom
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  • I assigned the letter but did not updated in windows explorer and also rebooted the system but did not work. – Trushar Gavit May 12 '20 at 16:18
  • @TrusharGavit Have you clicked the "apply" button? – DLCom May 12 '20 at 16:34
  • Because Paragon doesn't directly write to your disk. It let's you make changes, set up all kinds of partitions and only after you press the "Apply" button in the top left corner, it will actually write that to the disk. – DLCom May 12 '20 at 16:43
  • I did click on the apply button. Then it took some time to process but no effect was made on drive. – Trushar Gavit May 13 '20 at 14:20
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The problem is that Windows sees 2 primary partitions on the disk and it doesn't like that on removable media.
That is a stupid design decision Microsoft made years ago (technically there is nothing wrong, it works fine on Linux or MacOS) and because of that Disk Administrator refuses to do anything but removing the partitions/volumes.

Remove that first 16 MB partition. Eject the drive and then reconnect it.

BE CAREFUL HERE: Many USB drives come with encryption software pre-installed that gives you the option to encrypt your data. This software is often linked to such a small partition at the beginning of the disk. If you ARE using the encryption feature on the disk you should NOT touch that partition, but use the software that came with the drive to make the drive accessible on this computer.

Tonny
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