External SSD not detected in Windows 11 every now and again?

Hi all

I have a quite a few 2.5 inch SSD drives, when needed I connect them via a usb-sata cable. Every now and again Windows 11 does not recognise the drives. It shows up in "This Pc" but no drive letter, it also shows in device manager. When I click on it nothing happens.

If I connect it to a VM with Ubuntu, I can see all the files, so what I end up doing is copying them from there to a new drive. Then format the original and that becomes useable again, this is very time consuming and frustrating.

I always make sure that the device is not being written to or accessed when I disconnect it.

Can anyone please let me know what the root cause might be?

I would also appreciate if anyone has an easier fix? rather than loading it into Linux every time?

Dell XPS

Windows 11 Pro 25H2

Any info appreciated.

Try alternative ports and cables then run through these troubleshooting steps:

I'm making an assumption that when you say you are connecting it to an Ubuntu VM, that this VM is on the same physical machine that you are having difficulties with. This tells me that all is working at the hardware level but that there is some logic preventing the drive from being properly seen in Windows. In other words, this is NOT a hardware problem.

That in turn leads me to two ideas:

1) With some Hypervisors (VMware Workstation Pro is one example), you can set the default so that the SSD would be connected to the VM by default. As a result, Windows will not see the drive. Check your VM to see if such a setting is enabled. Another way to test this would be to shut down all VMs and see if Windows then sees the SSD.

2) It's possible that you simply don't have a drive letter assigned to that drive. Try opening Disk Management and see if it sees the drive. If it does, but it shows without a drive letter, simply assign it a letter withing Disk Management.

Thanks for the info so far.
I've tried most of the troubleshooting steps apart from assigning a new drive letter or the diagnostic-repair, I'll try them next time.
When the hard drive has the issue it is not readable on any Windows device but is readable on the same or different device that has a VM of Ubuntu, so the issue lies with how Windows actually reads the drive. I know it doesn't have one but it's as if the boot sector can not be read or system volume info?