I have a couple of external hard disks attached to my desktop via USB.?ÿ Until recently they both worked fine, always accessible, even though I generally power down the system at night.?ÿ But a week or so ago I was intending to eject a USB thumb drive and accidentally ejected one of the hard drives.?ÿ Upon realizing my mistake I cycled the power to it, and it came right back online, complete with it's normal drive letter (E:).?ÿ But upon rebooting the system the following morning, that drive wasn't available.?ÿ Powering it off and on again brought it back, but that's now the only way I've been able to make it accessible.
I want to go back to the condition in which it comes online whenever the system is booted, without having to do the power-down-power up routine.?ÿ It's just a button?ÿ push, but it's a nuisance because that drive is in a dark area beneath my desk.
So far my web searches haven't produced any useful suggestions, so I thought I'd pose the question here.
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I would suggest using "disk management" to reassign the appropriate drive letter.
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I never click eject drives. I just pull out the usb cable without ever running into troubles for the last 10 years or so...
I never click eject drives.
I have some thumb drives that throw error messages after remounting if I don't eject them properly -- even though no errors ever get found or fixed -- so I always eject thumb drives to avoid the error messages.
I have always ejected thumb drives but just plugged in/removed the cable on remote hard drives. That has been working. Of course I started out with mechanical calculators, the kind with the crank and bell, and didn't own a computer until I was nearly 50. So my knowledge is somewhat limited.
If you haven't backed up lately, now could be a good time.?ÿ External drives are cheap and a change in drive behavior can be bad.?ÿ Good luck
If you haven't backed up lately
I back up to the cloud daily, so data loss isn't a big concern.
Further investigation suggests that the drive is, indeed, getting wonky, so I just ordered an external SSD to replace the rotating media.?ÿ
