Unrecognized disk
Posted: Wed May 17, 2017 11:31 pm
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.
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.