External hard drive hit or miss

Since the most recent update, Opus sees my external hard drive sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. In both cases Windows 8.1 "sees" it fine (in "This PC"). Why does it only show up in my Folder Tree sporadically? How can I force Opus to see it every time?

  • Nothing related changed between Opus 12.5 and 12.6. The update was very small and tied to a few specific changes, unrelated to drives and the This PC folder.

  • Have you tried rebooting since the problem started?

  • Make sure you are never running Opus as Administrator as the Admin context may see different drive letters to the normal user context. (You can use Admin Mode to elevate individual windows, and use UAC in general within Opus, but you should not run the whole dopus.exe program elevated as it will cause problems.)

  • Try turning on Preferences / Folder Tree / Contents: Empty disk drives in case the drive is being detected as empty for some reason.

  • Antivirus may be involved, if it is treating one Opus version differently to another and/or sometimes deciding to block some programs from seeing USB devices.

  • If the device shows in Opus after viewing it in Explorer, it may not be reporting its status properly. Explorer does extra checks for such devices and if it notices they did not report their status then it will simulate the report and broadcast it to other applications to update them (including Opus, as long as it isn't running as admin; see above).