Unrecognized disk

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Bob Coleman
Posts: 785
Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2011 5:58 pm

Unrecognized disk

Post by Bob Coleman »

If anybody understands what happened here, that would be interesting, but I'm posting mostly to document this strange incident.

While my internal HDD was GPT, I got a USB external HDD to serve as a location for my backups. I just connected it to a USB port and everything was fine.

As documented in another recent thread here, I eventually converted the GPT disk to MBR and eventually EMBR while installing BIBM. The BIBM installation also converted the USB disk to EMBR because I checked an option to convert all disks or something like that. I'm not quite sure why I did that, but it worked and the USB disk continued work fine after its partition was filled into the MBR in Boot Edit.

Yesterday a Windows 10 notification saying something along the lines of "There is a problem with disk H:. Tap here to scan and fix." popped up.

I thought "OK, I'll run chkdsk in a few minutes", but when I got ready to do so, the drive letter was unrecognized. The disk was nowhere to be found in Windows! It also wasn't shown in BIBM either in Partition Work or Boot Edit. Windows Disk Management did show the disk, but as completely unallocated, presumably because there was no entry in its MBR. I couldn't put an entry in the MBR because BIBM wouldn't recognize the disk.

Fortunately, the disk was recognized in Partition Work under IFL. I used that to change the type to MBR which instantly fixed everything. I can now, in BIBM Partition Work and Boot Edit, switch back and forth between MBR and EMBR without any problem.
mashedmitten
Posts: 151
Joined: Sun Dec 04, 2016 2:16 am

Re: Unrecognized disk

Post by mashedmitten »

Sounds similar to something I experienced the other day when I installed W10 on a system on the third partition of my primary drive. Everything went fine, but when I booted to a W7 partition on the same disk, I got error messages about every partition on my 2nd HDD. I let it fix it and everything's been fine when switching. I still don't know what spit the error, BIBM or Windows. IIRC, the error came up right after BIOS, it never got to BIBM. My primary is EMBR and the 2nd MBR. I had created the partition with BIBM before installing W10 and got no extra partitions after install, so Windows shouldn't have had to do anything. Nothing broke in BIBM, everything booted from the same paths so nothing major appears to have transpired.
Bob Coleman
Posts: 785
Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2011 5:58 pm

Re: Unrecognized disk

Post by Bob Coleman »

It happened again yesterday. The USB disk was EMBR. I thought I had left it MBR. Either I was mistaken or it got converted to EMBR somehow at some unknown time, but that's not the point here. For whatever reason, it was EMBR. For reasons not relevant here, I unplugged the disk from the USB port. When I plugged it back in, BIBM Partition Work didn't recognize its existence.

Windows didn't either except that Disk Management did, indicating completely unallocated.

Fortunately, again, Partition Work in IFL recognized the disk and was able to convert it to MBR after which it was recognized by BIBM and fully recognized by Windows.

I'm thankful that, so far, IFL recognizes the existence of the disk, but I wish BIBM would consistently do so also.
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