How to make my hidden external hard drive show up using diskpart in windows 10

Question

When I plugin my external hard drive to my laptop it is does not show up unless I:

1) Open dispart

2) Type in the command:

list volume

3) See the number of the volume which belongs to my external drive. (For example 2) And use the code below:

select volume 2

4) Enter this code right after the previous one:

assign letter D

5) And finally type the code:

exit

All these step result in a non-hidden Hard drive, but when I eject it and connect it again it does not show up again and I have to redo the mentioned steps above while I must change the letter that I'm going to assign to the volume because the previous one is reserved until I restart my computer.

How can I fix this issue permanently and make my external hard drive show up or mount automatically any time I plug it into my laptop?

For more information, I'm using a 64-bit version of Windows 10 Enterprise and My External hard drive does not mount automatically on other computers too.

Solution

Three options:

1. After your select volume 2 command try

   attributes volume clear hidden
   

2. Or, if that doesn't work, set the partition type to NTFS (unhidden)

   set id=07 override
   

3. Otherwise the advice I can find on the internet is to delete and recreate the partition completely to ensure that the "hidden" property is removed.

Comments

[LPChip]

What if you assign a driveletter through Disk Management?

[Mokubai]

It is not "to promote NTFS", it is because above that size FAT32 starts to become less efficient and there are better alternatives. You also don't have to use NTFS, you can use exFAT which is the next generation of FAT filesystems.

[Topgundcp]

exFAT will handle file size larger than 4GB. However, it is more efficient on small USB stick, not a large capacity disk and cannot install Windows on exFAT FS.

[Naser.Sadeghi]

@topgundcp This is not related to my question. I know about file systems all I want is making my hard drive show up automatically every time I connect it to a computer. I was using this external hard drive for 2 years and this has happened recently. It has been changed to hidden drive and every time I must assign a letter to it in order to make it mount. help me fix this.

[Naser.Sadeghi]

@Mokubai I see but I use FAT32 because I work on my hard drive both in windows and mac. All I need to do is removing the hidden feature from it, but how?

[Topgundcp]

@MokubaiWell it is related to your question. Windows won't see the HD unless you convert to other FS.

[Naser.Sadeghi]

I can change the file system of my drive to NTFS but nothing changes it will be hidden again.

[Naser.Sadeghi]

thanks a million, the first option fixed my problem and there's no need for the others.