Windows 10: HDD unmounts on restart. Empty 'Local Disk' icon stays w/errors

So frustrated right now.

Ok, so I've been having a string of hard drive problems. The history of how I got to my current problem is below, at the end of the main post.

Windows 10 Home (20H2 OS build 19042.804)
Lenovo Ideapad 720s (laptop)

The current problem is that I have a Western Digital 4T My Passport (portable) HD that I'm using to backup some other drives for testing. But with this drive (and a previous drive), I'm having a problem. I came back to my computer today and the drive had unmounted itself. The drive (or partition), is visible in Disk Management but has no drive letter attached to it. I've used two tools to restore the partition/drive. But if I restart, the drive is again unmounted when the system comes back. But if I shut down instead of restart, and turn on again, then the drive does appear, once. If I shut down and turn on AGAIN, the drive again disappears.

I've tried two programs to restore the partition- "Find and Mount" (Atola Technologies), and Minitool Partition Wizard 12. Minitool seems to work better, I was able to shut down and turn on the computer twice before the drive disappeared. With Find and Mount I was, so far, only able to shut down and turn on the machine once before the drive disappeared. Using either program, restarting, not shutting down, will cause the drive to unmount on reboot.

There are no errors in Device Manager. I have reset BIOS settings to default. I have disabled 'selective suspend' (Power Options -->Change plan -->Advanced settings--> USB settings-->Selective suspend.) Western Digital drive tools shows the drive as healthly. CrystalDisk Info shows the drive as all good. Nothing seems to work. Chkdsk (properties-->drive tools) says the drive does not need to be scanned because it's healthy. "Update drivers" gives me "You have the most recent drivers installed."

AND NOW! I noticed that I'm using the same drive letter as the drive always had. I remember that a couple times before, when trying to remount, when selecting a drive letter, that the driver letter the drive usually had was not available, not listed. This has not happened recently, but I thought- maybe changing the drive letter might help. So I gave the drive a different letter. Old/original letter was 'W'. New letter is 'U'. When it changed the letter to U, the drive shows up under "This PC" window as it should. But it now also continues to show an icon for 'W'. It says "Local Disk (W". When I click on that, I get an error- W is unavailable, make sure the disk is connected. 'W' should no longer exist.





Clicking 'local disk' get's me:





So I rebooted again. Again, 'Local Disk (W is there, along with the now "U" drive. So I go to safely remove 'U'. The drive disappears, but NOW there's a 'Local Disk (U' icon as well! Giving the same error that I get with 'W'.





AND somewhere in this process I had the drive showing up fine in "This computer" AND at the same time being unmounted in Disk Management!





EDIT: Ok, so after- Changing the drive letter from W to U, safely removing 'U', (this is where I got two 'local disk' icons, one for W and one for U, I rebooted again. And this time there are NO local disks. So the misplaced local disks have disappeared.

But the WD drive is, again, unmounted. I'm at wits end. How to keep this drive mounted after rebooting???!
-------------------------------------------

So before this, just as background, in case something here is related- I recently had my boot disk (a 256 Intel nvme m.2 ssd) drive stop booting on me. Eventually I restored it from a backedup image, thanks to some good folk at TenForums, and at the same time upgraded to a larger Samsung SSD. Got everything up and running, booting, no problems.

Then I had a WD 5T portable hard drive with my movie collection on it start to give me errors. Brand new drive. Some movies would stutter, if I tried to RichCopy stuff off the drive the receiving drive would unmount, chkdsk would fix errors but then need fixing again on reboot. So I borrowed a drive from a guy and used TeraCopy to copy my movies over to his drive. All files copied without skips or errors. And that's when THIS 4T WD drive started unmounting.

I have a wonky setup with several drives, a USB/monitordock, two monitors, a 2-bay drive dock, etc. But these drives are plugged directly into the laptop.

I'm at a loss. Can anyone suggest anything?

:)

 

Windows 10 shutdown doesn't unmount despite......

Hi,

Thank you for the update and I apologize for the late response.

I appreciate if you could answer few questions to narrow down to the issue.

• 
  How exactly you are trying to unmount the drive. Is it through Command prompt or from Disk management?
  
• 
  What exactly happens when you try to unmount?
  
• 
  Did you receive any error message while trying to unmount?
  

I suggest you to try the steps given below and check if it helps.

Please close all the Windows before trying the steps.

• 
  Open Disk management.
  
• 
  Right-click the mounted drive that you want to remove, and then click
  Change Drive Letter and Paths.
  
• 
  Click Remove, and then click Yes.
  

Hope the information helps. Let us know if you need further assistance. We will be happy to help.

Thank you.

 

How to fix error unmountable boot volume

Hi James,

It is possible that you received the error UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME due to a damaged file system which failed to mount. This error also means that sub-system on machine failed to mount the boot volume. To efficiently assist you, we'd like
to gather more information:

• Have you made any recent changes prior to this issue?
• What is the exact error message you received?
• What troubleshooting steps have you done so far?

Meanwhile, we suggest that you you follow the steps shared by Michelle Her and
Billion Debbarma on this threads below to troubleshoot your concern:

• Windows 10 Unmountable Boot Volume Error Message And Automatic Repair
• Unmountable_boot_volume -Windows 10
  

Keep us posted if you need additional help.

 

unlock hdd

Hi Johan,

It is possible that your
HDD was unreadable
causing the error message to appear. We recommend that you perform these troubleshooting steps and check if there are any changes:

• 
  Shutdown
  your
  PC.
  
• 
  Unhooked
  the
  HDD
  and
  turn on
  your
  PC.
  
• 
  Reconnect
  your
  HDD
  and
  restart
  your
  PC.
  

If the issue persists, we suggest that you contact your
laptop/computer's manufacturer
for further assistance.

Update us on how it goes.

Regards.