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W11 & External HDD

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R

rgneedshelp

PCHF Member
Dec 20, 2023
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#1
I'd like to place a 2-bay SATA enclosure on our LAN. Bought an Insignia 2-bay unit from Best Buy. Connecting it to the n/w was problematic, but FIRST... When I connect it directly to a Windows 11 laptop (USB 3.0) , the computer sees the drives and their partitions under Disk Management but they do not appear as logical drives in File Manager.

OTOH, my Chromebook can list and manipulate the files, albeit in rather funky drive designations. I've never had trouble recognizing external drives like this. The actual drives were once connected to the LAN in a D-Link enclosure.

Stumped as how to get W11 to see the drive contents.

Ron
 
#2
G'day and welcome to the forum. :)

Changing drives from one NAS to another has never worked for me.
They each seem to use their own proprietary file systems, then add to that the RAID type used and I've never managed to have my files magically come across to a new NAS.

If the old NAS still works, put the drives back in that, connect an external USB drive to that NAS and copy the files onto the external unit to then plug into the new NAS to transfer your data.

My NAS units have only ever been used for backups, so this hasn't been an issue - move the old drives to the new NAS, set them up, and start a new backup from scratch.

When you put the old drives into the new NAS, it's going to want to setup the RAID volumes for you.
If this hasn't been done, that may explain why everything is funky.

The way I have setup access from Windows to the NAS is to setup volume shares.
For example, your new NAS has 2 drives, I'd set them up as RAID1, which means the two physical drives become one logical drive.
So if each is 4TB, you only get 4TB overall, as one is mirrored to the other giving you complete redundancy if one drive fails.
this logical drive gets assign to a 'share' and will be addressed from File Explorer something like;
\\your NAS IP address\your share name

In File Explorer I then create a mapped network drive to that location, assigning a drive letter to it.
That way whenever I need to access the NAS, I go to X:\ drive or Z:\ drive or whatever you setup.
 
#3
Uh... Thanks for the reply but maybe my description was misleading. I'm not dealing with a NAS nor do I want one, RAID or non-RAID. I'm trying to establish a simple external HDD connection via USB to already populated 1TB drives with a Windows 11 laptop (perhaps eventually Ethernet if I can make it available through our wifi router).

Has the native file format changed such that current Windows OS doesn't recognize the content? I can't imagine that would be true but I don't know why my Chromebook finds the files fine. That automatically means the problem isn't with the enclosure, drives, cable, etc.

Ron
 
#4
My mistake, I read it and wrongly jumped to a NAS solution.

So the Insignia is this...
1703141648052.png

If so , it is only USB3 connectable into a PC, what were your thoughts on getting it on the network? What method did you try?
All you'll be able to do is, while connected via USB, it'll show up as a drive, is to share that drive over the network.
That will work, but that method can be high maintenance, for one reason, the drive letter isn't guaranteed to always stay the same.
Plus others on the network won't see it if the PC it connects to is off.
This is why NAS was invented and is usually the best way forward when wanting a drive shared over a network.

But yes, Win11 should be able to see it if it is NTFS or FAT.
what was the make/model of the D-Link device?
 
#5
I believe I've determined the problem. Although these drives were once readable by Windows, they have become corrupted to the extent they cannot be recognized as logical drives. Windows sees the drives and some partitions but doesn't see a file system.

The surprising thing is that Chromebook susses out enough of the format to find and list folders and files. My job now is to use my CB to zip up and move files to its internal SSD for transfer to Web storage to save what I can. Merry Xmas to me. 😠
 
#6
The way Linux Distros sometimes have more success on faulty drives than Windows may also be the case with ChromeOS.

But still, at the end of the day, a corrupted file is still a corrupted file, so your success rate on recovering readable files off those drives may still be low - but you won't know until you try!

Fingers crossed and good luck.

Do you want to leave this thread open for a few days so you can report back on how you went?
 
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