Windows 10: Usb shows up as local drive F

I have a Western Digital My Passport Ultra usb drive that started making a bunch of irritating noises so i unplugged it and now it shows up as local drive f and becomes inaccesible thru explorer. I have tried different data recovery software and all of them including disk management just loads forever until i unplug the usb drive another thing i noticed is when i restart explorer my desktop background becomes grey and all of the shortcuts dissappear until i unplug the drive i mostly need to recover some files of the drive if anyone has a solution that would be great

:)

 

Local Drive (F) indicates full, but there is no Local Drive (F)

I continuously get a popup message saying Local Drive (F) is near capacity, and it shows "Local Drive (F) 30.8 MB free of 449 MB."

The problem is there is no drive (F) installed or plugged in! I have an external hard drive, and it is nearly full, but I unplugged it several months ago.

 

f drive

Hello Kathy,

Based on the information you have provided in your post; we need to do further investigation. To assist you better, we'd like to know the following:

• Have you tried using a third party software to manage the disk partition?
• Did you format the drive?

We suggest that you check for the drive in the Disk Management and look if it appears. Follow these steps:

• Log on as administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
• Press Windows+R key and type diskmgmt.msc and then click OK.

Look if the Drive F: appears and check if it is unallocated.

Looking forward to your update.

 

local disk f


This looks like the F: drive is the EFI partition having a size of 300MB. Open Admin Command (Win+X->Command Prompt (Admin)) and type:
diskpart
select disk 0
list partition =====> take a note of the partition # having 300MB. My guess is partition 2
select partition # =====> replace # with the number in step above
remove =====> remove the drive letter
exit

This should remove the drive letter and won't show up in "This PC"

P.S do not delete this partition, you won't be able to boot.