Windows 10 fails to assign drive letter to external USB hard disk drive on plugin

external hard drivehard driveusbwindows 10

I have a correctly formatted (Master Boot Record, FAT32) 500 GB SATA 2.5 inch drive in an external hard drive enclosure, connected by USB chord.

This drive automatically mounts flawlessly to my Ubuntu laptop, but when plugged into my Windows 10 laptop, it only registers the presence of a USB device that can be "safely removed," it doesn't assign a drive letter.

This is terribly inconvenient, as you might imagine.

How do I figure out if this is possible, and if it is, how do I fix it?

Best Answer

That sounds like a volume flag is set. Try this procedure to let Windows assign a letter automatically.
1. Open a CMD prompt with Administrator previlege.
2. Type in DiskPart and hit Enter.
3. Run the following commands one by one. Case insensitive.

List Disk

Identify your external drive from the given list manually. Assume it's disk # (a number), and run

Select Disk #
Select Partition 1
Attribute Volume Clear NoDefaultDriveLetter

Done. Now on every Windows system it should be assigned with a letter automatically and show up in Explorer.

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