Hello, I recently purchased a SanDisk Professional Pro-G40 (1 TB) Portable Drive for work use. I reformatted it to ExFAT with my MacBook so I can use it on the Mac and my work Windows 11 PC. The drive is recognized and functions well on the MacBook, but the Windows 11 PC does not detect the drive. I checked the Device Manager in Windows for the drive with negative results. The drive light for the Pro-G40 lights up while it is plugged into (USB-C) the Win 11 PC. I also tried another Win 11 PC with the same result.
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While this page already has 1.3K views and SanDisk staff couldn’t be bothered to provide any troubleshooting page for this £400 device issue (I have 4Tb version), I’ll share how I managed to resolve my problem with a disk being unavailable on Windows 11.
The device initially seemed to work fine. It was formatted as ExFAT to ensure read and write accessibility on both my MacBook and Windows workstation. However, it suddenly stopped appearing in Windows Explorer when connected (though worked in MacOS OK). Despite this, it was visible in Disk Manager (System Settings → Manage Disks and Volumes), and Device Manager indicated that the device was functioning properly.
The issue turned out to be caused by Google Drive, installed on the same machine, which had occupied and blocked the drive letter H: previously assigned to the external SanDisk device. This appears to have been caused by a device initialization order glitch.
To fix this, I changed the drive letter (Manage Disks and Volumes → Select the partition → Click the ‘Change Drive Letter’ button), and the device immediately reappeared in Windows Explorer. It seems to be working fine now.
