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All of a sudden I found my USB external drive was not working. My external disk was working for a long time.

I could plug or unplug it without any problems. I have a short cut to my external drive on my desktop. It is the E: drive. Usually when I plug the USB cable of my external drive to my laptop the drive will be automatically detected. And I can open up the dive by clicking the “E drive” short cut on my desktop. But today when I click on the short cut after I plug the cable in I saw this message “The drive or network connection that the shortcut to local Disk (E) refers to is unavailable. Make sure that the disk is properly inserted or the network resource is available, and try again”

It turns out that the drive letter assigned to my external drive disappeared somehow. You can follow the following step to fix it if you experience the same problem. Open up computer management console my going to Start, All programs, Administrative Tools and then Computer Management. Click on “Disk Management” under “Storage”. You should be able to see your external disk like the following screen shot.

There you can see the C drive which is the system disk, disk0, and another disk which has no drive letter, disk1. Now right click on the disk without drive letter and click “Change Drive letter and Path”. Click on Add then select a drive letter and click “OK”. After that the external drive will be working again

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