Usb Removable Disk No Media

[Elwanda Menhennett]

Thehard drive is connected via USB (tried all my 2.0 and 3.0 ob my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7) but once I initialized it in the "disk management" (or whatever the proper term is; I'm using a German edition of Windows) I have to assign it a manual drive letter. Otherwise it doesn't show up.

USB flash drives show up as removable media because they are made using flash RAM, so it's like a memory card rather than a actual drive. A hard drive on the other hand, is well, a hard drive, not flash RAM (SSD's are also just like flash drives for the most part), therefore for the computer to recognize the mass storage unit you connected to it, it requires a drive letter, even if via USB, since to the computer unless you are attempting to install a OS on the drive, will see it as a normal hard drive.

I like to set up my letters for them at the far end of the alphabet so they will re-acquire their previously assigned letter, which they usually do. Other recognition and lettering issues with USB external hard drives have existed for some people due to the drive having the exact same ID as another drive, which was also a solvable issue.

The HDD is there, but sometimes when doing this windows will assign a drive letter that already exists. Find the volume in disk management (start/run/diskmgmt.msc) If you can't find it, unplug the drive and look for the volume that disappears. Once you have found it right click it and and assign a drive letter that you know isn't used, or just set it to Q: if available.

my answer is you have to download the software of your external harddrive for example my external hardrive brand name is My Passport Ultra search in google the software or utilities of this brand and after you intalled it open it then format your external harddrive using that software so it will restore it into default and shown in file explorer my computer without assigning a manual drive letter :) it has it own by the way

In computing, a removable media is a data storage media that is designed to be readily inserted and removed from a system.[1] Most early removable media, such as floppy disks and optical discs, require a dedicated read/write device (i.e. a drive) to be installed in the computer,[2] while others, such as USB flash drives, are plug-and-play with all the hardware required to read them built into the device, so only need a driver software to be installed in order to communicate with the device.[3] Some removable media readers/drives are integrated into the computer case, while others are standalone devices that need to be additionally installed or connected.

The earliest form of removable media, punched cards and tapes, predates the electronic computer by centuries, with the Jacquard loom of 1801 using interlinked cards to control the machine.[7] This followed a loom made by Basile Bouchon in 1725 that used paper tape for its instructions.[8] Punched tape was later used in Colossus, the first electronic computer.[9]

The CD-ROM was introduced in 1985, providing much higher capacity than a floppy disk, however could not be written to. This was resolved in 1990 with the introduction of the CD-R.[16][17] The CD-RW, introduced in 1997 allowed the CD to be written to multiple times, rather than just once, as with the CD-R.[18] DVD versions of these formats introduced in the late 1990s provided further increases in capacity.[19] Additional capacity improvements were achieved with Blu-ray in 2006.[20]

The turn of the millennium saw the widespread introduction of solid-state removable media, with the SD card being introduced in 1999, followed by the USB flash drive in 2000.[21] The capacity of these removable flash drives improved over time, with 2013 seeing Kingston unveiling a 1 terabyte USB flash drive.[22]

Storage is intended to be used to access data that is access less often. Memory on the other hand is used to access data that is used on a more frequent basis. One of the problems with the earliest computers was how to store data. In the 1950s the International Business Machines (IBM) was trying to solve this problem.[23]

The first floppy disk was developed under the supervision of Alan Shugart in the late 1960s. The floppy disk was not introduced to the public until the 1970s by IBM. But, like any man-made product the floppy disk came with its pros and cons, such as it being cheap and portable while also having severely limited data storage.[citation needed]

The use of removable media creates a risk of data loss in the event that the media is lost or stolen. This can lead to the compromise of large amounts of sensitive data, which can result in significant damage to the reputation of a business, as well as possible financial penalties.[24] This risk can be minimised by company policies that reduce the use of removable media when transporting and storing data, and by encrypting the contents of removable media. Prior to the disposal or reuse of removable media, appropriate steps should be taken to ensure that all data previously stored on the device is not accessible.[6] Additionally, any device holding sensitive data should be kept secure when not in use.[24]

Removable media can also be used as a vector for malware. Attackers generally use social engineering to get someone to put a media device into a computer, for example by leaving an infected drive in a busy location, from which someone may pick up the device and put it into their computer to find its contents, such an attack is known as baiting. Once the device has been plugged in it can be used to infect an entire network. One example of malware that propagates through removable media such as USB flash drives is Stuxnet, which caused significant damage to Iran's nuclear program. The risk from an attack like this can be reduced by automatically scanning media for malware and prohibiting users from attempting to access the contents of removable media of unknown origin.[6][24]

So, basically I always format my removable mass storage devices as NTFS by default, but someone told me I was better off using exFAT. Now I've been looking around google, but can't find any good reasons why I should.

exFAT basically takes the FAT file system to the next level, adding a large amount of long awaited features that the FAT32 system was sorely lacking. One of the key features for people doing video editing is the support for >4GiB files and much larger partition sizes than FAT32 typically supported, making it much easier to work with modern multi-terabyte drives..

exFAT is available for Windows Vista, 7, and I believe I may have even seen a Microsoft release to make XP work with exFAT. There are some people working on Linux exFAT support, but I can't tell how far along they are, and as always, there is a risk of corrupting your data just like with NTFS...

What Microsoft developers have basically done is update the FAT32 file system to exFAT, moving from 32-bit addressing to 64-bit addressing, to offer an improved speed alternative over moving to NTFS at the same time making it possible to create, store or transfer huge files, files greater than 4GiB. In theory, exFAT does not have as much of the operational overhead of NTFS as it lacks many features that add complexity (and therefore processing time and disk latency) to the filesystems.

The only drawbacks to exFAT are that Microsoft has not released it into the public, requiring that companies licence it for use on their devices. This is likely more aimed at digital video recorder type devices, home users get a licence to use it with Windows.

NTFS has journaling which helps ensure the file system can recover from corruption, whereas exFAT does not. So if you use the drive only from Windows PCs and reliability and data integrity are important, such as for archival or backup purposes, NTFS should be used over exFAT.

When you copy an encrypted file to another NTFS volume, it stays encrypted using the same key(s) the original was. This can be great, and this can also be incredibly annoying, depending on your use case.

Basically, if you want to take your files to another computer that has all the same decryption certificates installed, choose NTFS on the removable drive. Then your files stay encrypted in transit, yet are transparently accessible on all authorized computers. Neat-o!

However, if you usually take files to machines that don't have the decryption certificates, there is no way to tell Windows to automatically decrypt a file when it's copied to an external disk. If you forget to manually decrypt it, you won't be able to access it on the other machine. If you do this often, choose exFAT on the removable drive. Any files you copy to it will then get decrypted automatically, on the fly. Edit see comment, apparently this isn't true in Win10.

Interoperability of the file system is important. exFAT is also natively, read/write supported by OS X Snow Leopard in 10.6.5 and later (although not mentioned in the release notes). This can be verified by checking Disk Utility, where exFAT is an option for formatting.

Recovery: the information about the deleted file (name, size, location) remains in the MFT. If the MFT record remains unchanged and the disk data is not overwritten, the recovery chances of this file are 100%. Yet, if this record is deleted, it is still possible to find the file by its content with the help of the raw recovery method. The recovery procedure is then performed by disk contents bypassing the file system structure.

Recovery: as links to files continuation may be lost, the recovery result for files with the size of several blocks can be incomplete. The chances for successful recovery of a file in case of a directory damage can be low as well. At the same time, recovery of files by their contents (the raw recovery method) may give highly positive results due to low file fragmentation.

As an example, my typical volume names for say a verbatim drive that is 256 GB is verbatim256. Now if I have a second drive of the same type, I can't even add 1 or 2 to the name because it has already reached max limit.

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