Option to take drive offline isn't there in Disk Management

Defame · March 22, 2018

I just replaced my laptop's hard drive with an external USB one. The bad one is still in my laptop. I used a program, WinToUSB, to transfer the Windows.iso file onto the ext drive and during the Windows setup I guess the internal drive was put offline. It's still more or less functional but extremely slow. I forgot some files that I needed so using Disk Management I put it back online to retrieve them and then I tried right clicking the drive again but there was no option to put it offline. How can I put it offline again?

https://gyazo.com/0faa8deffc3344c5e6deff43fa99c133

I know it's probably the most unorthodox way of replacing a drive

Oshino Shinobu · March 22, 2018

If you turned the drive back on, it may have booted onto the internal drive again. If it's running off the internal drive, you won't be able to put it offline.

Try rebooting, going into BIOS/boot options and making sure it boots from the external drive.

phongle123 · March 22, 2018

25 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

If you turned the drive back on, it may have booted onto the internal drive again. If it's running off the internal drive, you won't be able to put it offline.

Try rebooting, going into BIOS/boot options and making sure it boots from the external drive.

While mine does say Offline but it's greyed out since it's the primary drive. The drive selected in OP is also the primary drive so it wouldn't let him put it offline anyways??? Maybe check if the other drives show the Offline?

Defame · March 22, 2018

1 hour ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

If you turned the drive back on, it may have booted onto the internal drive again. If it's running off the internal drive, you won't be able to put it offline.

Try rebooting, going into BIOS/boot options and making sure it boots from the external drive.

If that were the case and I was running off the internal drive, I would notice because Windows slows to a crawl. Just for good measure I did restart and manually booted from the ext drive and went to disk manager but the option was still missing.

1 hour ago, phongle123 said:

While mine does say Offline but it's greyed out since it's the primary drive. The drive selected in OP is also the primary drive so it wouldn't let him put it offline anyways??? Maybe check if the other drives show the Offline?

No, that selected drive in the screenshot isn't my primary C drive. Both the drives lack the offline button.

Maybe there's another way to manage the drives other than Disk Management?