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I have a 500gb USB External SSD which is not visible, I have worked out, to computers that boot with UEFI. I have tried on a Windows laptop (with UEFI) & an Ubuntu laptop (with UEFI). However, it is visible on a Macbook Pro and an Ubuntu computer (in legacy boot), and it works fine there. I have transferred all the data off. I hope someone can help as I have spend hours on Google searching for a solution. Thanks, Charlie

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Most likely, the external HDD has been set up as a boot drive. You can remove all boot information by reformatting the drive; it should then be accessible from UEFI as well as BIOS machines. However, it's easier just to change the boot order on your UEFI machines so that they don't try to boot from the external drive.

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  • Ah. This may be the root of a problem I have. If it's set up to boot from USB, and the drive isn't bootable, will it just ignore the drive?
    – Marc Wilson
    Feb 13, 2021 at 14:09
  • When a non-bootable USB drive is inserted and the PC boot order is set to USB first, the PC will scan the drive for a few seconds, delaying boot a bit. It's better to leave boot order internal drive first, and change only when booting from external media.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Feb 14, 2021 at 2:02
  • It's not that then: it doesn't see the drive at all.
    – Marc Wilson
    Feb 14, 2021 at 14:28
  • @MarcWilson, How is it formatted? Linux and, I believe, Macs, can read/write ext4 (or older ext2 and ext3). If it's just a file-system issue, then, since the data has been saved from the HDD, reformat it in a way all PC's can read. My choice would be NTFS, but exFAT might work, if you install fuse eFAT packages on Linux.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Feb 14, 2021 at 18:16

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