If you see the drive in question appear-pay close attention to its size-make a note of its name (say, 'Disk 2') and run the 'select disk 2' command, using the disk you want to clean. When the prompt appears, type 'list disk' and press Enter to see the disks plugged into your system. Open the Start menu, type 'diskpart,' and press Enter. Again, this will erase anything on it, so only continue if you have no other options-and make extra sure you're cleaning the correct disk, or you could lose a lot of data.

To regain your drive's full capacity, you'll need to run Windows' 'clean' command, which will return the drive to a completely unformatted state. This is extremely common with SD cards formatted with Linux distributions for the Raspberry Pi, for example. In some more specific cases, the drive will appear in Disk Management, but merely formatting the drive won't work. If you're lucky, one of these simple steps should get your new drive up and running. Be warned that formatting it will erase any data on the drive, so only continue if you're sure you don't need anything from it.įinally, if your drive is online and formatted, but doesn't show a drive letter next to its name, right-click the volume and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths to add a drive letter.

This will also solve the problem if the drive is formatted for another operating system, as described above. If the disk hasn't been formatted (it'll say 'Unallocated' under a black bar), right-click it and choose New Simple Volume. If it's offline, right-click the disk's name (e.g. If it does, make sure it's online and formatted.

Once Disk Management loads, scroll down to see if your disk appears in the list.

Open the Start menu and type 'disk management,' and press Enter when the Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions option appears. If your drive is powered on but still isn't appearing in File Explorer, it's time to do some digging.

Pen drive detected but not opening