WD My book, drive letter not showing up.

JamesTheGreat · April 23, 2022

Okay here's the deal. I have an 8 TB Western digital My book external USB hard drive. When connected to "Desktop A" or "Laptop A" the drive shows up fine with the drive letter and I can read the information off the drive no problem.

However when connected to "Desktop B" or "Laptop B" the drive shows up in device manager. The drive even shows up in disk Management but shows as an unallocated space.

I have installed mini tool partition wizard on both "B" computers and inside mini tool I can see the partition is there. I try to manually assign a drive letter but as soon as I exit mini tool partition wizard the drive letter is gone again. If I go back into mini tool partition wizard and open that partition using that tool I can see all the data there.

My guess is that there is some type of security bug in Windows 11 causing the Western digital My book 8 TB not to show any information. DESKTOP A is a custom build I7-8086k with Gigabyte mobo running the most recent update of windows 10.

Laptop A is a Lenovo i7-8th gen win10.

DESKTOP B is a custom build, Asus mobo, Xeon E5-2640v3 running Win10Pro.

Laptop B is a HP Ryzen5 3500 running win11..

I've downloaded the Western digital software and installed it which makes no difference. I've tried deleting the drive from the device manager and rebooting the computer. I've reset the bios to default.

The really odd part is... My 1TB External USB SSD shows up on all 4 systems as well as any USB thumb drive I try.

And before someone asks yes I've tried different USB ports and yes I've unplugged it and plugged it back in. The bios are all up to date, Windows update doesn't show any more hardware updates available. And if I go into CMD DiskPart, I can see the physical drive under "view Disk", but no partition using "view volume"..

I've tried a half a dozen other things but none of them worked. I'm literally at a standstill with what to try next and in 25 years of working on computer hardware I have never seen anything like this.

So if anybody has any GOOD ideas, I'm willing to give them a try...

And before someone suggests it... NO, I'm not going to copy the data off, format the drive, and copy it back.