External hard drive seen but not accessible

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dre38w

New Member
Hi. I've seen this problem around but haven't seen a solution to my specific issue.

What my end goal is, is to format an internal HDD drive I had in my Windows 10 system. I removed it since I couldn't format it while it was hooked up as an internal. A side note: When I did that my desktop is now giving me a hardware change error for some reason. Even though I have the OS installed on the SSD. But anyway, I put it in an external enclosure to format it that way. Plugged that into my Windows 8.1 laptop and now the current issue:

I can see the drive in device manager and it recognizes it in devices and printers. But I'm not able to access it. The drive is working fine when I had it in my desktop. I can hear it spinning and isn't making any abnormal noises that I can tell. So I'm not sure what the issue is.

I should mention that when I went from 8 to 10 on my desktop I originally had 8 on this drive but then installed 10 on an SSD. But I foolishly never formated it before using it as a secondary disk. Had some access issues at that time, files seen, space taken up, but wasn't able to open most the files. That was resolved but thought I should mention it. There were system files left over from the previous OS I wasn't able to delete permanently. I would delete them but they would show back up on the next boot up.

Any thoughts?
 
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If the drive is blank then all you need to do is go into disk management and format it and assign it a drive letter.

As far as the hardware change error goes, its most likely cause when you did the install previously, the boot files were placed on the hdd and not on the SSD so you will just need to do a repair install or manually fix the boot record.

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/repair-master-boot-record-mbr-windows
 
Thanks for the reply.

The issue was I couldn't see it in disk management. Forgot to mention that.

And yeah, I figured that was why the error showed.

But I solved it. I'm doing a fresh install. I was trying to get to this point anyway since I bought a bigger SSD to put my OS on. Formatted the HDD through that. I forgot you can do it on the OS installer.

Now if I can get past the install process. It's being a pain. Solve one problem discover another. haha

Thank you!
 
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