Windows 10: External Hard Drive Dissappears after restart Plz Help

I'm sorry for your loss and welcome back.

I'm not seeing any indication of a real problem in the chkdsk output. I've regularly seen some small number of items like the 7 unused items being cleaned up both on my fairly new SSD and on another forum member's 3 year old HDD and don't believe that's a problem per se. I have seen pop-ups like you describe from Windows 10, however, on inserted external drives - I will let that run once and have seen the pop-up then recur with no real reason for it.

In the case of this drive, however, and other posters' expressed concern that perhaps it's getting a bit long in the tooth, maybe it would be a good idea to run "chkdsk /R L:" from a CMD prompt on it and see if any bad sectors are found. This can take hours to complete but gives a start on assessing the mechanical condition of the drive - you'll have to decide if you're OK to let it sit for hours to run. Look for a message in the output near the end regarding any number of bad sectors found.


I'm assuming at this point you are connecting both branches of a Y-cable to 2 USB ports and ensuring sufficient power supply as highlighted by topgundcp above.

 

No i have a Y connector but i only ever use the 1 connector for the past 3 or 4 years have never had to connect both of them on my desktop PC but if you think that might be the problem i will start using 2 USB ports in future & let you know if the issue arises..

also how do i make chkdsk run pacifically for drive (L) Only, Please let me know??

I MEAN IF I WRITE chkdsk /R L: IN CMD WILL IT CHKDSK DRIVE L OR ALL THE DRIVES CONNECTED

 

1) I'm not sure how sensitive your drive is to having the right amount of power available but it is certainly worth trying to use two ports and see if you have more reliable results. With both ports connected, you probably have only one used for data flow but both available to provide power as needed.

2) chkdsk /R L: will run specifically only on your L drive. The /R switch (as opposed to /F) is there to have it scan for bad sectors (no longer good for data storage and retrieval) and mark them as UNUSABLE by Windows so that Windows will no longer use them to store valuable data.

The main purpose to run this would be to have an indication of whether your disk is starting to fail. Beginning to have bad sectors and increasingly more is a pretty good sign that this drive is about ready to go into the dust bin (after wiping any personal data!) and, as appropriate, be replaced. If no bad sectors, no reason to toss it yet.

 

Glad you got it hooked up right. Maybe you can mark this one solved.