Windows 10: External HDD showing up as Local Disk (F:) and Not Responding

Greetings,


I'm in desperate need of help. I bought an WD My Passport HDD about 4 months ago , it seemed to work fine until today , When I connect it to the Laptop it shows up as Local Disk (F and the Storage bar is not shown , As shown in the picture.

I tried right clicking in order to change the sharing options but explorer.exe just crashes on me.

I need help because My External drive holds almost 1.2 TB of data and I can't store it anywhere else in my laptop as you can see from the picture so formatting the drive is also out of the equation.

Any help appreciated.



:)

 

External hard drive is showing up as local disk drive

Hi,



Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.



As you have mentioned that the external hard drive is showing as local disk drive instead of a USB drive, it is because the file format for the external hard drive is same as the internal hard drive and that’s why it is showing
up as a local disk drive and not a USB drive.



Also, since you are facing issues while changing the drive letter of the drive, for further clarity on the issue and to guide you accordingly, respond to the questions listed below:

1. What is the make and model of the hard drive?
   
2. Were you able to save or create a file on the hard drive previously?
   
3. What happens when you try to copy and paste the data from the hard drive?
   
4. What was the result of check disk performed on the drive?
   

Since you are receiving the access denied error, I would suggest you to check if the user has appropriate permissions to read/write data on the external hard drive. Refer the article

"Access Denied" or other errors when you access or work with files and folders in Windows, refer the section
I cannot access, change, save, or delete files and folders.



Note:
The above article applies to Windows 10 also.



Please get back to us with the above information to assist you further with the issue.



We await your response.



Regards,

Prakhar Khare

Microsoft Community – Moderator

 

local disk f


This looks like the F: drive is the EFI partition having a size of 300MB. Open Admin Command (Win+X->Command Prompt (Admin)) and type:
diskpart
select disk 0
list partition =====> take a note of the partition # having 300MB. My guess is partition 2
select partition # =====> replace # with the number in step above
remove =====> remove the drive letter
exit

This should remove the drive letter and won't show up in "This PC"

P.S do not delete this partition, you won't be able to boot.

 

Local Disk F

Yesterday I downloaded the new Window 10 update. I then started getting messages that said my local disk f was almost full, I needed to clean. I open Disk F and it shows that it is empty. I do not understand why I am getting this notice, or where local
Disk f came from, or how to fix it.