Windows 10: Device Manager: Drive volumes show as Portable Devices???

On my laptop only my sd card and USB flash thumb drive show as removable devices, but on my newly installed 14393.693 desktop, all except my System and Boot drive volumes now show up in Device Manager as Portable Devices, even though they are just partitions on my 2 hard drives.




Is this very unusual, or does it happen from time to time for others?

:)

 

new win 10 dual drive pc - D:\ is not shown

Greg

I did see the link

I already had Disk 1 allocated as simple volume and then was able to re-name it to D (it was F). But I did not format but it was showing under both device manager>Portable devices and disk management, but still was not shown under 'this pc'.

Per your suggestion I went and formatted D drive in Disk Mgmt. Disk 1 (D). It now reads 'Healthy (Primary Partition'. It continues to shows in Device Manager>Portable Devices as D:\. And still not showing up in file explorer - I was expecting to show up
here after formatting. The pc sees D: but I'm not able to access it.

Do you have other suggestions ?

thx dave

 

External Hard Drive Not Showing

I have a WD Caviar Green 1TB portable disk. It shows up on Control Panel and on Device Manager but doesn't have a drive letter.

On Disk Management it is shown as Disk 0, Partition 1, 5 ,6 but on right click all the options except "Delete Volume" and "Help" are greyed.

Any suggestions how I can access it?

 

Are the other drives set to Hot Swap in UEFI/BIOS?

 

MBR BIOS only - they are just partitions on 2 HDDs, so no more swappable than the boot and system volumes, on one of the 2 disks

Just used Disk manager to shrink one partition by 30GB and created a new volume (m: Nova), which does not show as a portable device after scanning for hardware changes in devmgmt:




weird.

 

It couldn't be something that simple to rectify, huh*Sad

 

It's no great problem, just odd. I'll check out the Motherboard & storage drivers, it may not have the full set, as I only have had the machine for a couple of days, (as a dumped machine in need of employment and am still working it out.) Probably when I lose the MS Generics and apply proper Intel drivers it will look different.

 

Almost always, internal hard drives showing up as removable drives is caused by the AHCI SATA driver (or lack of a compatible driver).
Modern motherboards can be hot swap capable, which means the AHCI SATA Driver must be able to communicate to Windows the special identifiers that tell it "This is an internal, (potentially) hot swappable drive", not a typical removable drive.
Changing the Hot Swap settings in UEFI/BIOS will not fix the behavior as the SATA controller is still potentially hot swap capable under AHCI standards.

Normally, the behavior can be fixed by installing the motherboard manufacturer's proprietary AHCI SATA Driver.
But today many manufacturers rely on 3rd party drivers. Intel systems often rely on the IRST Driver.
Careful with IRST Drivers. Annoyingly, there are many versions of them and they must be compatible with your motherboard. Always best to use the one offered by the manufacturer.

Keep in mind that common registry tweaks are just workarounds. They don't solve the behavior, just hide it.
Which is fine if it works for you, as this is not a performance problem.

 

Thanks for that wisdom TV2.
I have just returned here after downloading and installing the Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3V (rev1.0) drivers for the onboard devices, including IRST, as I hinted I was going to do in my previous post.

Yep - they seem to have fixed the Device Manager misreporting Removable drives - and I plugged in a Sandisk Cruser blade for good measure:

 

Glad you got it sorted.
A new build is not finished until all the drivers are installed!