Associate
Apologies for ignorance as I know very little about managing storage drives and this is all very much on the fringe of my computer knowledge:
I have an old 1TB external HDD, used it fine for years (including recently) with no issues. I flashed Batocera (retro game Linux distr and my first time touching anything Linux) to the drive using Balena Etcher. After doing this and wanting to boot from the drive, the drive became invisible to my W10 PC in file explorer and W10 disk management and does not boot regardless of changing the boot order on BIOS.
The flash was successful and the flashed drive should create two partitions, a bootable FAT32 partition and a userdata ext4 partition. The BIOS itself can see the external HDD device because I can mouse over the USB ports (BIOS provides a visual model of the PC where you can inspect every port) it's plugged into and it shows 'USB Western Digital drive etc etc'. So it can see the drive exists.
The boot partition should be visible to both File Explorer and Disk Manager but the entire drive is invisible on both.
https://wiki.batocera.org/batocera.linux_architecture
In Minitool Partition Wizard, the drive and its two post-flash partitions are there as they should be but the smaller boot partition is blank under the 'File Type' column, where I would have expected it so say "FAT32". Screenshot https://imgur.com/dg4IbO3
I have wiped the drive (didnt realise it would take 4 hours..) using Mini Partition Wizard and re-flashed the Batocera image, unsurprisingly has made no difference. After wiping the drive, it did become visible in Disk Manager and File Explorer but was inaccessible to windows (properties showed it as blank 0mb) and gave an error message ' drive offline, try assigning a drive letter and path...' when attempting to format using Disk Manager.
I now have the disk re-flashed with the image and am in the same position as before - invisible to Disk Manager and File Explorer and not booting.
Any help greatly appreciated, this is the last step in what has taken me 10s of hours to get my old game collection set up to be emulated in one place.
I have an old 1TB external HDD, used it fine for years (including recently) with no issues. I flashed Batocera (retro game Linux distr and my first time touching anything Linux) to the drive using Balena Etcher. After doing this and wanting to boot from the drive, the drive became invisible to my W10 PC in file explorer and W10 disk management and does not boot regardless of changing the boot order on BIOS.
The flash was successful and the flashed drive should create two partitions, a bootable FAT32 partition and a userdata ext4 partition. The BIOS itself can see the external HDD device because I can mouse over the USB ports (BIOS provides a visual model of the PC where you can inspect every port) it's plugged into and it shows 'USB Western Digital drive etc etc'. So it can see the drive exists.
The boot partition should be visible to both File Explorer and Disk Manager but the entire drive is invisible on both.
https://wiki.batocera.org/batocera.linux_architecture
In Minitool Partition Wizard, the drive and its two post-flash partitions are there as they should be but the smaller boot partition is blank under the 'File Type' column, where I would have expected it so say "FAT32". Screenshot https://imgur.com/dg4IbO3
I have wiped the drive (didnt realise it would take 4 hours..) using Mini Partition Wizard and re-flashed the Batocera image, unsurprisingly has made no difference. After wiping the drive, it did become visible in Disk Manager and File Explorer but was inaccessible to windows (properties showed it as blank 0mb) and gave an error message ' drive offline, try assigning a drive letter and path...' when attempting to format using Disk Manager.
I now have the disk re-flashed with the image and am in the same position as before - invisible to Disk Manager and File Explorer and not booting.
Any help greatly appreciated, this is the last step in what has taken me 10s of hours to get my old game collection set up to be emulated in one place.