Question Disk drives show up greyed out when using Wavlink WL-ST335A docking station

JMusic7

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Mar 11, 2021
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I bought a Wavlink WL-ST335A docking station a while back. I tried putting my old hard drive in it before but I encountered a problem where my 1TB WD Blue (which is almost filled completely with data on it) shows up as USB drive D:, F:, G: but they're all greyed out. When I go into disk management it shows disk 1 and windows tells me I have to initialize it. If I initialize to use the drive (and reformat/partition it), that will erase all the data on the drive right? I don't know how to access the drive and retrieve files if I have to initialize, reformat/partition it and lose everything on it. Pictures of hard drives and disk management
 

JMusic7

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Mar 11, 2021
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1,530
Those USB drives ( D : , F: , G: ) - are card reader devices.
To access them, you have to insert micro SD or SD card into your docking station.

Weird. That's what it shows when I attach my blue Western Digital 1TB drive to the Wavlink and power it on.

Does that mean my drive isn't showing up?
 
I bought a Wavlink WL-ST335A docking station a while back. I tried putting my old hard drive in it before but I encountered a problem where my 1TB WD Blue (which is almost filled completely with data on it) shows up as USB drive D:, F:, G: but they're all greyed out. When I go into disk management it shows disk 1 and windows tells me I have to initialize it. If I initialize to use the drive (and reformat/partition it), that will erase all the data on the drive right? I don't know how to access the drive and retrieve files if I have to initialize, reformat/partition it and lose everything on it. Pictures of hard drives and disk management
Perhaps the power supply is not working properly and the wavlink doesn't have enough power to process the drive. Alternately to determine if its a windows problem you could boot your computer with a usb containing a linux distro to see if that fully recognizes the drive.
 
What do you see in Device Manager? Disk Drives, Storage Controllers, Universal Serial Bus controllers/devices?

Select View -> Devices by connection. Locate your drive.

On my laptop my internal NVMe SSD appears under ACPI x64-based PC -> MS ACPI-Compliant System -> PCI Express Root Complex -> Intel PCI Express Root Port #5 -> Standard NVM Express Controller.
 

JMusic7

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Mar 11, 2021
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What do you see in Device Manager? Disk Drives, Storage Controllers, Universal Serial Bus controllers/devices?

Select View -> Devices by connection. Locate your drive.

On my laptop my internal NVMe SSD appears under ACPI x64-based PC -> MS ACPI-Compliant System -> PCI Express Root Complex -> Intel PCI Express Root Port #5 -> Standard NVM Express Controller.

Under disk drives:

ASMT 2115 USB device

Generic storage device USB device (two of them)

My SSD

and my external hard drive.

When I disconnect the Wavlink, only my SSD and external hard drive still show.

Storage controllers:

Microsoft storage spaces controller

Standard NVM express controller

USB serial Bus controllers/devices:

USB bus controllers and devices
 

JMusic7

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Mar 11, 2021
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I suspect that if you connect your drive to a SATA port inside your computer, it won't show up in BIOS.

Nope. That was the first thing I tried a few months back when I took it out the old computer to put it in this one. It wouldn't show up at all next to my C drive so I tried going into BIOS. The hard drive and PC worked perfectly fine before I took the hard drive out. Now when I put it back in the old PC it won't boot properly. I keep getting a UEFI shell error. Nothing I do in my old computer's BIOS will make it boot into Windows. It can't read the drive for some reason much as my new PC can't. I don't know why it's happening when it was working just fine before I took it out the old PC.