[Fixed] HDD Not Showing in Disk Management on Windows 11

Help! My HDD not showing in Disk Management on Windows 11

Why HDD not showing in Disk Management?

As the example mentioned, after installing the hard disk into the computer, many users will encounter  the problem of that  this new HDD not showing up in Windows. Usually, the following reasons may cause the computer cannot find a newly installed hard drive:

♦ Connection problems.
♦ Outdated or invalid disk drivers.
♦ The new HDD is not initialized.
♦ Drive letter is lost.
♦ The file system is wrong or incompatible.

How to solve "HDD not showing in Windows 10 Disk Management"? Below, we provide different ways to fix HDD not be found error according to different reasons.

How to fix HDD not showing in Disk Management on Windows 11

You can try the following solutions to solve the problem and successfully find the HDD on Windows 11 Disk Management.

│Solution 1. Check basic connections

If your externally connected HDD not showing up in Disk Management, there may be a connection problem due to a faulty SATA converter or connection port. So you can try the following operations:

✍ Check the USB port on your computer.

✍ Change a SATA converter.
✍ When there is a separate switch on your HDD, please don't forget to turn it on.

│Solution 2. Update or reinstall disk drivers

When Windows 11 Disk Management cannot find the newly installed HDD because the disk driver is outdated or inappropriate, you may wish to try the steps below to update or install the driver.

Step 1. Click "This PC", "Manage", "Device Manager" in order to open Device Manager.

Step 2. Right-click your device, then click "Update Driver".

Step 3. Click "Search automatically for updated driver software" and wait a moment.

In addition, you can try reinstalling the driver directly:

Step 1. Open Device Manager, right-click the target HDD and select "Uninstall".

Step 2. Restart your PC and Windows will try to reinstall the driver.

│Solution 3. Run Hardware and Device Troubleshooter

If you don't clear what caused that on Windows 11 installation HDD not detected, you can use the troubleshooter in Windows to see what's wrong:

Step 1. Press "Windows + R", then input "control" and press "Enter".

Step 2. In the new window, type "troubleshooting" and choose it.

Step 3. Click "View all", select "Hardware and Device" and follow the instructions.

│Solution 4. Initialize the HDD

When the HDD you installed is a new HDD you just bought, maybe you didn’t initialize it, so this disk not showing in Disk Management. But how to initialize the new disk?

Here, a convenient disk managing master - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard can help you initialize a new hard disk for free. It also has some free features including Wipe/Merge/delete/Resize/Create/Format partition, Wipe Hard Drive, Change Drive Letter, etc.

Step 1. Download and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, right-click your target HDD and click "Initialize Disk".

Step 2. In the small window, select MBR or GPT according to your need (Here we choose "MBR".), then click "OK".

Step 3. Click "Apply" to confirm the pending tasks.

After you initialize a new hard drive, in order to better organize your data, you can use this free software to create some partitions on this new HDD:

Right-click free space and click "Create Partition", then follow the prompts to the next steps.

│Solution 5. Change drive letter

When the drive letter of your HDD is missing or repeated with another drive, the HDD also cannot appear on the computer. You can reset the drive letter with the following steps:

Step 1. In the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. Right-click on the HDD, click "Advanced" and "Change Drive Letter" in turn.

Step 2. Select a new drive letter for your HDD in the popped window, then click "OK".

Step 3. Click "Apply" and "Proceed" to realize your settings.

│Solution 6. Format the hard drive

When the file system is corrupted, the HDD will not show up in Disk Management. An effective solution is to format your hard drive, so please follow the detailed steps to format this HDD:  

Step 1. In the main interface, right-click the HDD and click "Format Partition".

Step 2. Type the partition label and select "FAT32".

Step 3. Click "Apply" to operate this formatting work.

To sum up

In this tutorial, we proposed 6 solutions for the issue of "HDD not showing in Disk Management on Windows 11", you can choose the appropriate method according to your actual situation.

By the way, if you want to know more advanced features of AOMEI Partition Assistant such as allocate free space and move programs to another drive, you can go to the Professional Version.