My passport showing up with blue questionmark on windows 10

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

My passport 2tb shows up with a blue question mark over it whenever I put it into my computer, windows 10, and I cant access the files. The device shows up on device manager and disk manager but I cant change the letter. It also shows up on wd discovery, saying it is in read only and I have to reformat it, but previously it was working just fine. I dont want to reformat the drive because I would lose my data. Is there a fix for this?

2

Hi,

Please refer to the following KB article: Windows: Change Drive Letter Assignment

3

Whenever there is “disk unknown not initialized” issue occurs, your hard drive may show unallocated space in Disk Management, and the data on which will be inaccessible or else there is another situation: there is no disk space shown in Disk Management.

There are a few possible reasons behind hard disk not initialized listed below. You can find out the real cause based on your own situation.

  1. File system corruption.
  2. Virus infection.
  3. Bad blocks and sectors.
  4. MBR damage.
  5. Connection problem.

You can give a try to below mentioned 2 different methods to resolve the issue:

Method 1. Use Disk Management to fix not initialized error on external hard drive

  1. Connect uninitialized external hard drive to your PC.
  2. Press Win + R keys, type: diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter.
  3. Find the uninitialized, unknown external hard drive with I/O device error > Right-click on it and select Initialize Disk.
  4. Then set the disk to initialize and set disk as MBR or GPT.

After this, you may reboot your PC and keep all changes. Now, your external hard drive will be recognized and read by Windows again.

Method 2. Run CMD to repair I/O device error on not initialized external hard drive

This CMD command would erase all data on the uninitialized hard drive, which you can later restore after repairing the external hard drive not initialized, with the help of any data recovery or partition recovery software:

  1. Press Win+R > Type: diskpart and hit Enter.
  2. Type: list disk and hit Enter.
  3. Type: select disk F and hit Enter; (replace F with the drive letter of an uninitialized external hard drive).
  4. Type: clean and hit Enter.
  5. Type: convert gpt or convert mbr and hit Enter.
  6. Type: create partition primary and hit Enter.
  7. Type: format quick fs=ntfs and hit Enter.
  8. Type: assign and hit Enter.
  9. Type: exit and hit Enter.

Hope it will help!