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AOMEI Backupper Win PE Can't Read the External Hard Disk

If AOMEI Backupper Win PE can't read the external hard disk? What can you do? Maybe there are two reasons.

Lily

By Lily Updated on November 12, 2025

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You may know there are varieties of reasons that may cause system failure to boot, so after you created a system backup with AOMEI Backupper, you'd better make 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 follows:

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 that AOMEI Backupper WinPE cannot recognize your external hard drive in this case.

Regarding adding the driver, please click "WinPE Bootable Media Cannot Recognize Some Devices".

 

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 provide 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 "AOMEI Backupper doesn't recognize the drives".

If there are still any problems, please contact us.

Lily
Lily · Editor
Lily Green joined AOMEI in 2018 and has since become a professional in the areas of data protection and data transfer. She is committed to helping users protect their precious computer data and troubleshoot Windows system errors. She consistently stays vigilant about the latest trends in technology, guaranteeing that the given information aligned with the ongoing advancements in the field.