I am a freelance video editor and was asked to back up footage from a WD HFS+ external drive, reformat the hard drive to NTFS, put the footage back onto the hard drive and mail it out to a client. Sounds easy enough, right?

Once I received the WD hard drive, I did just that: copied the 3TB of data to my local SATA SSD (Samsung SSD 870 EVO 4TB); did a quick format of the WD drive, selecting the NTFS option; copied the footage back to the WD HD and shipped it off. Months later, I have a grumpy client who says that something is wrong with the hard drive.

Here’s the info I received from their IT person:

We are unable to see the drive in File Explorer. It always appears under Device Manager, but it does not mount on any of our PC’s. It populates under Disk Management, where I can see an 1862.70GB Primary Partition, but there is no drive letter assigned. I have no option to assign a drive letter, and all options are greyed out except for “Delete Volume.” We are not able to see its contents in any application.

When this has happened to me before, the problem has been that the hard drive was formatted incorrectly. But unless I just deleted the footage somehow without actually formatting - missing the entire point of the task haha - I am 99% certain I formatted to NTFS before putting the files back. The client says they’ve been able to access other drives just fine, so it doesn’t appear to be a firewall issue.

Apologies for a lack of details as I’m not 100% certain what my client is working with other than the fact that their business uses Windows; also, I did this task months ago but it’s only coming up again now, so I don’t remember all the details clearly. But I am wracking my brain as to what went wrong, perhaps in a doomed attempt to save face. The client seems to think I messed things up somehow and I can’t figure out what I could have possibly done wrong!

Thank you!!

ETA: INFO ABOUT MY PC

Windows 10 OS; AMD Ryzen B550 ATX platform, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 3.7GHz 12 Core motherboard, 2xDDR4-3200 32GB RAM, Samsung 980 Pro 500GB and 2TB hard drives