How to Unhide Drives for Automatic Mounting on Windows 11

by Rian

After the upgrade from Windows 10, one of the immediate problems I had was hidden NVMe drives. I have some SSDs hooked up via PCIe cards that are formatted in NTFS. What I realized after the upgrade is that all of the drives are still functional; everything is in tact, just that they are marked hidden.

Solutions

As I was saying about SSDs being nominal, we first do need to establish the drive and the partition are accessible. It can be easily done from Disk Management. If it cannot be manually mounted, I suspect there is, indeed, a problem, with either the hardware or the filesystem.

  1. (opt.) To examine if the disk is discoverable and functioning properly, right-click on Windows icon from menu bar, and select Disk Management. The drive in question is likely missing a drive letter, and assigning one will mount it.
  2. Launch Command Prompt with administrative privilege and run diskpart. You can select the disk and partition with following commands:
list disk
sel disk [number from the previous list]
list partition
sel partition [number from the previous list]
  1. Run the following commands to examine if the partition was set to be hidden:
attributes volume
  1. Ones we are looking for is “Hidden” and “NoDefaultDriveLetter”. Either one of the attributes could stop the drive from auto mounting. Clear with the following commands:
attributes volume clear Hidden
attributes volume clear NoDefaultDriveLetter
  1. Reboot and confirm the drive mounts automatically.

Afterthoughts

As for what causes Windows 11 to mark or edit the partitions to be hidden, if I were to hazard a guess, I believe Windows 11 installation process had the drives hidden. I can’t speak for other cases; and frankly, I suspect this isn’t a common problem.

When I was searching through what could be the possible causes and the solutions behind the problem, one of the frequently repeated answers was drivers issue. Since I had just finished upgrading from Windows 10, I did find the argument sound — until I was able to manually mount the drive from Disk Management. If it were the case of broken drivers or others, the drive in question would not be accessible at all.

– How-to /

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