CnW Recovery have recently come across an issue with Windows 11 where external drives were not seen by the operating system. It is normal for a drive drive, such as USB to be plugged in and then seen in windows as may be Drive E:
With a new Windows 11 system, drives were plugged in and not seen as a logical drive. CnW software would see them as a physical drive, but windows would no see them as a logical drive. This applied to USB and eSATA drives
There were three attempts to fix the problem, as shown below
Computer Management program was run. In this program there is a section 'Disk Management'. Here one could see a drive with a Healthy (basic data partition), but no drive letter. A right mouse click can be used to 'Change drive letters and Paths' At this point use 'Add...' and assign a letter. This wll fix the immediate problem, but may not help for the next boot ofthye PC.
Next attempt was to ensure the Virtual Disk manager is running. Go to services.msc and then search for the function 'Virtual Disk'. Double click on the entry and mak esure the startup is automatic.
Third attempt is DISKPART. Start a command prompt in Admin mode and type DISKPART
This will produce a pronpt DISKPART> Enter 'automount' and you will see a message of either Automatic mounting of new volumes enabled or Automatic mounting of new volumes disabled
If it is disabled, enter the command
DISKPART>automount enable Then DISKPART>exit
Afer this, a new drive should be automatically recognised.