Hard Drive accessible from its letter, but not present in "This PC"

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idlacrosseplayer

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Feb 2, 2016
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I have a hard drive installed. It's formatted NTFS, and has successfully been assigned a drive letter "H:" in Disk Management.

I can type into any Explorer address bar "H:/" and my file tree shows up as expected. However I cannot for the life of me see it in the "This PC".

Considering I know it's formatted and I can see the files/folders (and access them just fine) if I manually type in the path, I assume there's just some Win 8 option somewhere that got toggled. Any ideas?
 
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

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Jul 31, 2014
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Hey there, idlacrosseplayer.

I assume that this an external drive (please correct me if I'm wrong). You could try uninstalling it from Device Manager, to see if it's OK after you've connected it and the driver for it has been installed again.
This is a bit strange. I'd suggest that you try changing the letter, to see if the same thing happens. Here's how to do it: How to change the drive letter assignment in Windows.

Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD
 
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idlacrosseplayer

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Hey Boogieman,

No, this is an internal drive, and it USED to be mapped and present in "My Computer", Explorer, etc. It's across all my non-system drives; I only see system drive C:/ and a single secondary drive D:/, but none of my other drives show up anymore. In disk management, I've removed the drive letter association, and tried a new one, which makes it appear! However, I then remap a second drive's letter, and it appears, but the first one disappears again!

 
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

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Jul 31, 2014
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That's a bit odd. I'd recommend that you backup any data which you might have on those drives, just to be on the safe side. After that, go ahead and try them one by one (I mean with one of the drive disconnected from the motherboard, to see if the letter disappears after assigning it a new one and you reboot). You should also download those drives' manufacturers' respective diagnostic tools and test them, to see if any errors or bad sectors pop-up.
Don't be alarmed just yet, as those are standard troubleshooting steps when there's possible issue with a drive. It might be some sort of software issue, but it's better to test the drives out and see what happens.

Please keep me updated.
 
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idlacrosseplayer

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Feb 2, 2016
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Boogieman_WD. I'll do that this weekend. I'm positive the issue is something software related, specifically a setting somewhere in Windows, but it couldn't hurt to reseat all the sata cables once at a time.

jsmithepa - That's the problem, the drives aren't in My Computer. They're connected; the BIOS picks them up; Windows Disk Management Utility sees them all and they have drive letters assigned. I see, "oh, look, the drive letters are there, let's try to access it manually by typing in the path (like H:/) into the Explorer address bar" and bam, there is my filesystem, as expected, and all files are fine.

I can right click at the root of the drive (i.e. H:/) and I get the standard drive options properties window: defrag, scan, sharing, etc.

In short, there is *apparently* nothing wrong with the drives, their filesystem, or their contents, just some weird reason that Windows doesn't want to place their icons in the My Computer view (or the left column of windows explorer either)

I'll do what Boogieman recommends and if that doesn't work, I'll throw some screencaps up to show the details.
 
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