My Book 5TB drives show up only after I open Disk Management or unplug then replug the drive power cord

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I am running into a strange issue and could not figure out how to make it go away:

After I plug my My Book 5TB drive with 4 logical partitions to USB 3.0 port of my HP Pavilion Sleekbook 14 that runs Windows 10 Home 64 bit,

  1. The drive is detected since I can hear the spinning upon plug-in, and I can also use the “Eject My Book” feature under “Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media”
  2. NONE of drive letters shows up, therefore I cannot access any of the files on any of the logical drives :cry:
  3. If I open Disk Management, as soon as the “Disk Management” starts showing “Connecting to Virtual Disk Service”, the logical drives on My Book 5TB starts showing up one by one
  4. If after safely removed My Book 5TB, I also unplug the power cord of My Book, then the drive letters show up upon USB 3.0 connection without having to open Disk Management.
  5. The issue exists on both of my USB 3.0 ports
  6. The issue does NOT exist on my USB 2.0 port
  7. My Seagate USB3.0 3TB external hard drive does NOT have any of the issues that My Book 5TB has.
  8. My another SATA hard drive in a USB 3.0 enclosure does NOT have any of such issues, either.
  9. Swapping USB cables used by Seagate and My Book made NO difference
  10. Uninstall driver did NOT help
  11. Did a clean installation of Windows 10, i.e. wiping off everything, and making sure no other external hard drives or network hard drives are connected, issue is still there
  12. The issue only started showing up a week or so ago, after I successfully copied files to and from the My Book 5TB

The unplugging power after safe removal of hardware makes me wonder whether upon unplugging USB cable, the hard drive still somehow thinks the hard drive is connected, therefore, upon reconnection, does not start the usual communication that is needed to bring the drive letters up?

Interesting though, the issue does not show up on my other laptop that also runs Windows 10 Home 64 bit, however, on that laptop, the hard drive seems to go to sleep all the time, and I need to wait very patiently to be able to get to the file path I need.
Both laptops have Auto Windows Update.

Any help/suggestions are appreciated! I would really hate having to migrate the huge amount of data on it yet again in order to return the hard drive.

Thanks a lot for your help!

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2

Hi there,

Try uninstalling the device from device manager and then power cycling both the computer and the drive and see if this helps.

3

Thank you! Nothing changed. Drive letter shows up only if I connect the USB cable after a fresh power cycle of the hard drive.