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I have a Dell G7 laptop with Win10 on the C-drive (solid-state drive, SSD) and a separate D-drive (spinning HDD) for data, files, etc. The C-drive is nearly full, so all of my documents are on the D-drive. Last night the laptop did a forced reboot after installing the KB5001028 quality update, and suddenly the D-drive disappeared. I tried uninstalling the update, ran the Windows troubleshooter, scandisk, device manager, disk management, etc., no joy. The drive literally disappeared from the OS - it's not in device manager, disk management, I can't find it in a command prompt or powershell. I checked the BIOS and made sure the D-drive was not disabled somehow - both Disk0 (C-drive) and Disk1 (D-drive) are enabled in BIOS, but the D-drive has just vanished from within the OS - only Disk0 appears in any of the control panel widgets. I even took the back off the laptop to check cable connections, etc., but everything looked fine and still no D-drive after putting it back together.
Earlier today I connected an external USB hard drive to the laptop - this drive was mapped as D. Sometime later the old D-drive suddenly re-appeared in Windows Explorer as the E-drive, with all files apparently intact. I disconnected the external drive and re-installed the quality update and rebooted - the drive was still there, now mapped as the E-drive. But then a little while later the E-drive disappeared again.
I'm completely baffled - I guess it *could* be some intermittent failure in the drive hardware, but I can't even run a diagnostic on it since it's just gone. It doesn't show up in device manager, so i can't update or re-install the driver. In disk management I tried to rescan for drives but it doesn't appear - only Disk0 shows up. I'm suspicious of the Windows update - I've checked online but found no reports of problems with this particular update.
Why would the drive just disappear completely from the OS, and then reappear? One last thing - the update originally failed to install because the C-drive was too full, but it forced a reboot anyway. Could that have caused the issue somehow?
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Earlier today I connected an external USB hard drive to the laptop - this drive was mapped as D. Sometime later the old D-drive suddenly re-appeared in Windows Explorer as the E-drive, with all files apparently intact. I disconnected the external drive and re-installed the quality update and rebooted - the drive was still there, now mapped as the E-drive. But then a little while later the E-drive disappeared again.
I'm completely baffled - I guess it *could* be some intermittent failure in the drive hardware, but I can't even run a diagnostic on it since it's just gone. It doesn't show up in device manager, so i can't update or re-install the driver. In disk management I tried to rescan for drives but it doesn't appear - only Disk0 shows up. I'm suspicious of the Windows update - I've checked online but found no reports of problems with this particular update.
Why would the drive just disappear completely from the OS, and then reappear? One last thing - the update originally failed to install because the C-drive was too full, but it forced a reboot anyway. Could that have caused the issue somehow?
Continue reading...