AOMEI Backupper Win PE can't read the external hard disk

If AOMEI Backupper Win PE cant read the external hard disk? What can you do? Maybe there are two reasons.

AOMEI
April 7, 2021

You may know there are varieties of reasons may cause system failure to boot, so after you created a system backup with AOMEI Backupper, you'd better making an AOMEI Backupper bootable media for emergency use. At that time, you are able to boot the computer from the media to restore your OS. However, some users may find their external hard drive is not visible when they boot from the media.

Introduction:

AOMEI Backupper bootable media may be unable to recognize your external hard drive in two cases as follow:

Case 1: The external hard drive is visible to the program in Windows but not in WinPE. In this case, you need to add drivers to the WinPE media.

Normally, when you add a new device to the computer, Windows device manager will inform you that it is detecting this device and then installing the driver, after that, your device will be available to use. That means the original Windows doesn't include the driver for your device, however, AOMEI Backupper WinPE bootable media is created based on the original Windows kernel, so it is reasonable why AOMEI Backupper WinPE cannot recognize your external hard drive in this case. Regarding add the driver, please click here.

Case 2: The external hard drive may be an advanced format disk but AOMEI Backupper doesn't support it so far. This is a temporary problem.

Currently, Advance Format is referring in particular to 4096 bytes (4k) sectors format disks. You can find the definition of what Advanced Format is on Wikipedia. In short, it can be more efficient to use disk space and provides a more efficient mechanism of data integrity error checking.

There is an easy way to check whether your external hard drive is advanced format or not, please follow steps: click Start--in the search box, type inMsinfo32.exe, next, select component--storage--disk, then in the right section, you could find the value of sector/bytes, if the value=512*2n(bytes), then it should be advanced format. If it is, then our software doesn't support it yet.

For more details, please refer to here.

If there are still any problems, please contact our AOMEI Support Team.