A Computer with Windows 10, 8 or 7 Cannot Find a Hard Disk – What Can You Do?
Tags: beginners, testing, test, tutorial
Published: 2022-03-27 13:42:37

Read this article to find out what to do if one of the hard disk partitions is not shown in This PC folder after reinstalling Windows, or if you installed a new hard disk in your computer and it is not displayed too, though you can see it in BIOS.

## A Local Disk is not Displayed in This PC Folder
Sometimes you can face a situation when a hard disk is physically available for the computer, but one of its logical disks or partitions has disappeared and is not displayed anymore. For example, you used to have disk C and disk D in your computer, and suddenly, disk D is no longer shown in This PC folder.

In order to fix the problem and make disk D visible in This PC folder again:

Right-click on the Start menu and select Disk Management.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/wclzrx0gtljdclr31tlo.png)
## A Disk Letter has not Been Assigned
If you have a missing partition on your hard disk, check if there are any unallocated areas there, or an area which is allocated already but it doesn’t have any drive letter. Sometimes the disk contains some data but there is no letter assigned to it.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qj9jdvzu12m0ompadapb.png)
So do not hurry to take any action to avoid losing this data.

At first, make sure that this area is not Unallocated but it is, for example, an NTFS disk. In this case, you just need to assign a drive letter.

To do it:

To do it, right-click on this area. In the menu, there should be a line saying Change drive letter or path.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/93abyx1wi7wbx9os90aw.png)
Click Add. Choose the drive letter. In this case, that is disk D. Click Ok.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/aa51k3ck9o9azaq2rjwf.png)
As a result, the disk will be displayed in the Windows Explorer, and this time it will have a drive letter.

## An Unallocated Area on a Disk (Unallocated)
If you open the Disk Management tool only to find that the disk not displayed in This PC folder is described as unallocated space – Unallocated, here is what you should to put things right:

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ot571yyw5rs9m17yr9jd.png)
Right-click on that unallocated area and select New Simple Volume. It starts the New Simple Volume Wizard directions. Create a volume by following the step-by-step procedure.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/zfowgbg0sqtt8m8hkeeh.png)
Set the volume size; by default, all available size of the unallocated area is selected.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/2356c3067pfo3i7av7n8.png)
Assign the drive letter. In my case, I leave the default letter D as it is, but you can choose any from the list. Also, I don’t change format settings. For modern versions of Windows, NTFS is the optimal choice. After clicking Finish, wait a little. Disk D appears in the Windows Explorer.

## The Computer Can’t See a New Hard Disk
If you installed a new hard disk into your computer as a way to add more storage space, and it is not displayed in This PC folder, that’s a different situation. If that is your case, check if the disk is initialized.

To do it, start the Disk Management tool and check if the operating system can see any uninitialized disks.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qdcnlfcn6wcj9psqe6tv.png)

If there is one, most likely this is the disk that the computer cannot recognize. Then, right-click on the uninitialized disk and select Initialize Disk. In the Initialize Disk menu, select partition style: either MBR or GPT. I’d recommend choosing GPT if you have a modern computer with UEFI; If your computer doesn’t support UEFI or you don’t know it for sure, then choose MBR and click Ok.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/41cg3eu12yljx9vw0le9.png)
As a result, the disk will be initialized but it will remain invisible for the Windows Explorer as it still has unallocated space on it. o do it, right-click on this unallocated space and select New Simple Volume. After that, do the same things as in the previous example with creating a new simple volume in an unallocated area of the disk. As a result, you will get a new disk displayed in the Windows Explorer.