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AspenFrost's avatar
AspenFrost
Iron Contributor
Dec 15, 2025

External SSD not detected in Windows 11 every now and again?

I have a quite a few 2.5 inch SSD drives, when needed I connect them via a usb-sata cable. Every now and again Windows 11 does not recognise the drives. It shows up in "This Pc" but no drive letter, it also shows in device manager. When I click on it nothing happens.

If I connect it to a VM with Ubuntu, I can see all the files, so what I end up doing is copying them from there to a new drive. Then format the original and that becomes useable again, this is very time consuming and frustrating.

I always make sure that the device is not being written to or accessed when I disconnect it.

Can anyone please let me know what the root cause might be?

I would also appreciate if anyone has an easier fix? rather than loading it into Linux every time?

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