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I have a single partition NTFS external hard drive that I use with a Raspberry Pi. I'm getting some i/o errors, so I plugged it into my Win10 machine to see if I could run chkdsk on it to further understand the issue.

When I plug the drive in, the disk does not appear with a drive letter. I can see it in Disk Management (it shows a single healthy partition labeled Primary Partition, and seems to be about the right size).

If I right click on the partition, the Change Drive Letter and Paths option is grayed out (as are all the other options except Delete Volume and Help).

If I run diskpart, and do LIST DISK, I can see the disk with status Online, and otherwise looking OK.

If I do LIST VOLUME, I only see the internal HDD volumes listed, and nothing from my external drive.

If I do SELECT DISK 1 then LIST PARTITION, I see my single partition with type Unknown.

If I do SELECT PARTITION 1, then SET ID=07 or SET ID=07 OVERRIDE, I get the message "The specified type is not in the correct format." And yet... I am using the exact command that is used as an example under HELP SET.

I realize the disk is likely damaged, but would like to at least run chkdsk on it and try to recover the data.

What else can I try? I think I need a drive letter to run chkdsk.

Screenshot showing diskpart session

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  • Maybe it has something to do with the filesystem types, nfts vs fat? It might explain why windows can't assign a drive letter. Not sure dough
    – Wout Rombouts
    Commented Dec 11, 2020 at 22:02

1 Answer 1

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I solved the problem. In diskpart, after selecting my partition (as shown in the question), I tried DETAIL PARTITION. That revealed that the partition type was 0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4. On a whim, I googled this guid, and learned that it is a kind of Linux equivalent of EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 which is a standard Windows partition type.

[ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_basic_data_partition]

With no other ideas, I set the partition type in diskpart: SET ID=EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7. It took a minute, but the system automatically assigned my drive a letter, and everything is working again.

I haven't yet plugged the disk back in to the Raspberry Pi, but I was able to run chkdsk and the drive appears to be operating properly.

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  • I would accept this answer, except I seem to have two accounts with the same user name, and I can't figure out how to log into the other one. Nor can I figure out why it didn't use my stackoverflow account which is what I logged in as. I thought they were all linked. Oh well...
    – Watusimoto
    Commented Dec 13, 2020 at 2:42
  • Just a quick followup... after reattaching to the Raspberry Pi, things still seem to be working nicely.
    – Watusimoto
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 6:57
  • stackoverflow.com/help/merging-accounts
    – ChanganAuto
    Commented Sep 23, 2023 at 0:56

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