Issues with my Seagate drive

It appears I’ve wandered into the wrong corner of the internet with my previous inquiry, so I’ll attempt to find some clarity here instead. This entire headache began immediately following my installation of Windows 10.

Inside my machine, I have a Seagate drive that serves one singular, sacred purpose: acting as a repository for backups and essential files. For the most part, I keep it disconnected from the system entirely—I only plug it in when I need to transfer photos or critical data, and once the task is finished, I physically disconnect the cables to ensure everything stays safe. Everything worked flawlessly during the week prior, but ever since I moved over to Windows 10, the computer refuses to acknowledge its existence at all. In an attempt to troubleshoot, I actually pulled the drive out of the chassis and popped it into an external enclosure; once it was connected as an external device, the system recognized it perfectly, allowing me to move all the data I had backed up before the upgrade. However, back inside the PC, Disk Management identifies it simply as disk 0, and the only suggestion it offers is to convert it to a dynamic disk. My burning question is this: does performing that conversion wipe the contents of the drive clean, and more importantly, would it actually allow the OS to recognize it properly? I do have the capacity and the extra space to migrate everything onto an external hard drive if that is what it takes to resolve this mess, so if that's the path forward, I am prepared to take it.

I mean, did you maybe mess around in Disk Management at all? Like, were you playing with spanned or stripped volumes? Or basically setting up some kind of Windows RAID array? For stuff like that to even work, the drive has to be set to dynamic. I have no clue what exactly you were tweaking, so I can't give you a straight answer, but yeah... converting it to a dynamic disk won't wipe your data or anything, but you won't be able to install Windows on a dynamic disk either. Honestly, if you don't actually need a RAID setup, your best bet might just be to switch everything back to basic disks.

Thanks for getting back to me.
The whole thing just sort of resolved itself, which is one of those classic tech mysteries that leaves you scratching your head. I finally got home, fired up my rig, and wouldn't you know it—the drive is showing up just fine now. I haven't touched a single setting or moved a single slider; we just upgraded to Windows 10 this past Friday, and that’s exactly when this headache started.
Up until today, the system was stubbornly identifying it as disk 0, and when I tried to right-click, the only option it would even consider was converting it to a dynamic disk—which, frankly, sounded like a recipe for disaster. But now? Now it’s appearing as disk 1, and suddenly the usual options—renaming, formatting, the whole nine yards—are all back on the table.

Thanks again, though I suppose the real mystery remains: what on earth caused such a mess, and why did it decide to fix itself out of thin air?

I mean, I honestly think you might have some kind of glitchy loop stuck in your system somewhere 😬

Ha! Well, perhaps there was some sort of restless spirit lingering in the machine after all. Regardless, I suppose the important thing is that everything seems to be functioning properly now.

If you have your machine online running Windows 10, most of those supposed "problems" simply resolve themselves... I won't bother explaining how.

It's like there are gremlins crawling all over my PC, reporting every little thing back to Microsoft... 😬

Linux was engineered to function, whereas Microsoft exists solely to extract profit 😁
And they've been snooping for ages... tell me, has your machine ever actually warned you that it was connecting to the web because it had 2 GB of data ready to upload?

They're sniffing around, I tell you. Just sniffing around.
I've come to the realization that things have shifted in a rather peculiar fashion; the Seagate suddenly manifested itself right after I poked around in the BIOS. To be perfectly clear, I didn't actually tweak a single setting—I merely drifted through the menus and exited without saving anything, yet there it was. I realize how utterly absurd that sounds, truly, but then we ran into this bizarre issue with the DVD player as well. My kid was itching to watch some cartoon on a disc, and wouldn't you know it, the drive just refused to cooperate. So, I did the exact same thing—re-entered the BIOS, glanced around, and exited—and suddenly everything was functioning perfectly again. Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’m no high-level IT specialist, but it seems highly indicative that both these glitches were resolved by the exact same sequence of events. As for any actual poltergeists haunting the house? Well, I haven't noticed any of those quite yet.