Windows 10: No visibility or access to one of my partitioned drives D: after recent Windows update

I have recently updated Windows 10 to 1903.


I store all my documents on the D: Drive a partition on my laptop hard disk. Since the update in File Explorer the D: drive has a blue question mark over it - when I double click on it the egg timer comes up and does not go away. Right clicking on D: again produces the egg timer. Also in File Explorer all the recent D: drive documents come up - when I click on them I get the Location not Available error.


When I go to CMD and type in D: it does not recognise the drive.


All aspects of the C: including the Desktop seem to be working fine.


There are a number of references to a similar problem, but I could not find my specific problem and a solution.


Several posts suggest that it might be a faulty drive - but it was working fine before the upgrade - I suspect that a pointer or a Registry item has got corrupted.


Below a snapshot of my Disk Management:





Initially I classified it as 'location not available' as below but it clearly has to do with the loss of a partition:


https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/d-drive-on-laptop-hard-disk-location-not-available

:)

 

Local Drive D is showing "access denied"

I have a Lenovo 100S-14IBR-80R9. It came with 32 GB of SSD. However, recently I started getting message that I need to update Windows 10 and that my OS will not work after 10th Apr 2018. When I tried updating, it gave me a message that I needed 8 GB space
- there was no way that I could find 8 GB in a drive which had only 500 MB left. As such, I took following steps:

• I added a 250 GB SATA SSD but the added space was useless to this purpose since it needed space in C drive and so the system continued asking me to clean up space so I could free up 8 GB in C drive for the update.
  
• Recovering 8 GB in C drive was impossible so I re-installed Windows by media creation tool and after the installation, 250 GB drive has been designated C drive and the original 32 GB drive was no longer visible in windows explorer though in disk management,
  it shows up but all options for 32 GB partition are grayed out.
• As such, I installed mini partition wizard and assigned a label D to original 32 GB drive. Now it became visible in Windows explorer with D label but when I click on this D drive, I get "access denied".
• I reformatted this drive as both FAT32 and NTFS to no avail.
• Tried Windows 10 troubleshooter for Hard Drive and Shared folders to no avail.
• Adjusted User Access Control to no avail.
• I adjusted the security settings of D drive to no avail.
• I have used diskpart to set id=07 but keeps saying location not available.

So, before almost giving up and re-installing my windows all over again, here is my last attempt to find any potential approach that I might have missed.

 

W7 Hard drive partition issue

to get rid of that 100 meg windows partition that setup creates for you on a new install on a blank hdd:

- press shift+f10 when on the partition management screen in setup <-- this opens a command prompt
- diskpart <-- start the windows command line partition management tool
- list disk <--- list the installed hdds in this computer for the next step
- select disk 0 <- might have to replace 0 with the number of the correct disk
- clean <-- this will erase all data on the disk you selected one step up- dont use the wrong disk!
- create partition primary <- creates a primary partition taking up all space on the drive, adjust the command if necessary
- exit, exit to exit diskpart and the command prompt
- click refresh in partition manager and select your newly created partition and install to that

 

Lost D:\ Drive after recent windows update

Hi David

My name is Andre Da Costa; an Independent Consultant, Windows Insider MVP and Windows & Devices for IT MVP. I'm here to help you with your problem.

Is the D:\ a partition or a physical drive?

If its a physical drive, does it show up in your BIOS?

You mentioned this happened after a recent update, try performing a system restore to see if the drive is restored:

Press Windows key + R

Type: rstrui.exe

Hit Enter

This will start the system restore wizard. Choose a restore point before the problem started.

Click Start, type: CMD

Right click CMD

Click Run as administrator

At the prompt, type the following, then hit Enter:

Diskpart

Hit Enter

List disk Select disk N (N is the number of the disk holding D partition)

List partition Select partition N (now N is the number of the D partition)

Detail partition (remember the type value of the partition, which is good if something goes wrong)

Set id = 07 override

Exit

Restart then see if it reappears.