Device not found: External drive is missing or not detected. Please insert the disk into the USB port.
Device not found: External drive is missing or not detected. Please insert the disk into the USB port.
I'm dealing with a problem involving my external SSD. I'm setting up a Windows Server course for my college and needed a VM and ISO files. I installed the VM on my local drive and the ISO files on my external drive. Mostly everything went smoothly until the VM started, then Windows began installing Windows. Suddenly, the external drive seemed to disconnect from my computer, but nothing physically moved. When I opened File Explorer, the drive didn't show any space, even though it should have 2TB. Checking the drive properties revealed zero bytes. I tried opening the drive and got a message saying "Please insert disk into drive D," which appeared in Disk Management as "no media." Running chkdsk and error checking both returned similar errors: "cannot access drive." I've been searching support forums for hours, but I'm still confused. Recently, I decided to reformat the drive, yet Windows still says "there is no disk in drive D," making it impossible to proceed. My confusion grows—why would Windows fail to detect it when it worked before? This situation is frustrating and exhausting. Any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Other ideas that come to mind: bad port or controller? Have you switched to something else? Probably a different controller would help. It might be the case that the enclosure failed—so you could open it and connect the drive another way. -corrupted Windows Metacrap or drive Metacrap? Need a chkdsk check or another fix like fixmbr. -Would another operating system recognize it? Linux Live CD seems the quickest method I’ve heard of for this. Edited September 4, 2022 by Bombastinator
You did the correct steps, which is why it stopped working. I might consider using a different PC just in case, though that probably won’t make a difference.
It could be this situation. Electronics might handle it, but NVMe didn’t. You could open the device and swap the drive into another case. If you have a backup USB stick, try loading a liveCD to check if the issue is Windows-only. If the NVMe fails completely, data recovery for HDDs is unclear to me. SSD recovery seems confusing to me. One idea is that if the drive is dead, the problem likely lies with the enclosure itself—replace the internal drive if possible. If the drive works but the enclosure is faulty, swap the new NVMe into the old case and try again.