Initializing an external hard drive in Windows 10

[captaincougar]

I upgraded to Windows 10, and my Maxtor one touch 4 mini will show up in My computer, but will not let me initialize it. Says access is denied. It has files on it and works fine on my desktop, which has Windows 7 on it. It did work fine on my laptop with windows 7 also, but does not work with windows 10. Thank You for any help. Ron Santo

 

[Ironsounds]

Hello...You have to give permission to a already installed Windows OS, for the ADDED SSD/Drive in that system... Computer-manage-Disk Management, Right click, the graphic below for "mark partition active" or other needed drive tools.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there captaincougar,

Keep in mind that initialization is data destructive. So, you don't really want to do that in case you have data stored on the drive.
How is the drive recognized by Disk Management and Device Manager? When you do get that error message about the denied access?

There are quite a lot of threads on missing external drives after Win upgrade. Most of these, are caused by driver related issues.
My suggestion would be to go to your MOBO's website and update your USB drivers.
After that, you can go to Device Manager -> right click on the device and uninstall it -> plug it out -> reboot system -> plug it back in and wait for it to automatically install.

Let us know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[tekken3]

if simply upgraded to win 10 by using the win 10 upgrade app this cause some storage issues it show showed my hdd as ssd so i would suggest doing a clean install but first you should try D_know_WD method if that doesn't work then do the clean install

 

[captaincougar]

Hi there captaincougar,

Keep in mind that initialization is data destructive. So, you don't really want to do that in case you have data stored on the drive.
How is the drive recognized by Disk Management and Device Manager? When you do get that error message about the denied access?

There are quite a lot of threads on missing external drives after Win upgrade. Most of these, are caused by driver related issues.
My suggestion would be to go to your MOBO's website and update your USB drivers.
After that, you can go to Device Manager -> right click on the device and uninstall it -> plug it out -> reboot system -> plug it back in and wait for it to automatically install.

Let us know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[captaincougar]

From Captaincougar: Device manager shows the drive as Maxtor one touch usb device, and Disk Management shows it as disk 1, unknown, not initialized, and Unallocated. When I right click and click on initialize disk is when I get the access denied message. I will try to get my usb drivers updated right now. Thanks, Ron

 

[D_Know_WD]

Have you tried the drive on another computer? It may be a good idea to try that as well.
Yet again, do not try to initialize it as it will wipe the data.
In case the issue persists even after the drive is attached to another computer, you can try accessing it with some data recovery tool. Check this one: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

D_Know_WD