My ssd hard drive says unallocated in disk manager and will no longer show up in file explorer

I have two WD drives…

2.5" SATA
1Tb WD WDS100T2B0A-00SM50, SN 22013B802109

WD Blue 3D NAND Sata SSD M2 2280
WDS200T2B0B-00YS70, SN 180661420887

Both were working fine but I had to make some changes to the PC. My graphics card died and I had to warranty it through NVIDIA. When the graphics card was coming out, my motherboard stopped working and I had to replace it too. I’m not sure what happened but the QLEDs wouldn’t light up with power.

I thought the MB swap would be straight forward, replaced it with a very similar ASUS MB, but when I went to reconnect all my drives, two WD hard drives weren’t showing up.

I tried using Disk Drill to scan the disk but it cannot find any files on the 2.5 drive and it cannot see the M2 drive at all. I’m plugging both into a USB C hard drive reader and have tried the original PC and into another lap top.

Any ideas?

Hi @Maguirej

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the SD Technical Support team for best assistance and troubleshooting:

Some motherboards have issues with M.2 SATA SSD

The SATA model should be recognized fine

Check the MB fora BIOS update as sometimes that can fix some issues

Here’s what you can do:

  • Check the BIOS settings to see if the drives are detected and ensure the SATA mode is correct.
  • Connect the drives directly to the motherboard instead of using the USB-C reader.
  • Try a different USB reader to rule out any issues with the current one.
  • Make sure all cables and connections are secure.
  • Open Disk Management to see if the drives show up as unallocated. You can assign a drive letter through Disk Management, but the SSD may turn RAW.

I am attaching a blog link for your reference.

Unallocated errors are due to user errors as I have not seen problems like this even with XP etc