How to take a Drive Offline or bring a Disk Online in Windows 11

Get ready to learn How to take a Drive Offline or bring a Disk Online in Windows 11 because here is all that you need.

How putting a disk drive offline and bringing it back online is done for those using Windows 11 onwards. When a disk becomes offline, it can no longer be mounted or accessed. In addition, neither the This PC section nor the navigation pane of File Explorer shows an offline drive. Besides, getting the drive back online is a prerequisite before initializing it. To that end, we have discussed some in-built tools in this essay.

Note that one cannot disable the system disk before proceeding. Offline action requires that an extra hard drive or portable disk or USB disk is connected. Secondly, this is an action that is performed right away, and it ought to have displayed a warning or confirmation box before the disk goes offline or goes online. These options are not available on disposable media like Blue-rays, memory cards, DVDs, etc.

Most importantly, this technique will not delete or clear any data present in your drive. At any point of time, if you take a disk online or you take it offline, all the data and folders that are present on it will be accessible.

Bring Offline Disk Drive or Bring Disk Online in Windows 11

In total, there are four inbuilt methods to make a disk drive offline or online in Windows 11. To see the following options on your Windows 11/10 desktop, laptop, or tablet, you must log on as administrator:

Take a disk drive offline or bring it online via the Settings application.

See if a disk is offline or online through the Command Prompt window.

Use Disk Management for Offline or online hard drive. 

Take hard drive offline or online by Windows Terminal.

Following are the options to be checked, as well as a step-by-step guide showing how to do the same.

1] Bring a disk offline or make a disk online through the Setting app. 

If you want to make disc drive offline in Windows 11, you can do that by:

Right click the Start button and open Settings. 

In Settings, select System then Storage. Now select Advanced Storage Settings. Now, type in "Disk & volumes."

You will see every disk that is attached. 

From here select the disk you wish to change-always avoiding the Windows or system disc-and select the Properties button. 

Under Status click Take offline.

It will automatically close the Settings application after some seconds once it successfully takes the disk offline.

Then, in the Settings application, go to the Properties of the concerned disk and then from under the Status section tap the Bring online option so that it goes online.

2] Take Disk Offline/ Online via Command Prompt Window 

END.

To take a disk offline on a Windows 11 PC, follow these additional steps:

Open a Command Prompt window via an administrative method of doing so, or otherwise

Type the diskpart command for managing drives, creating partitions, among other things.

Type list disk at the command prompt. This will show you all hard drives attached to your Windows 11 PC and if they're online or not.

When ready to take a disk offline, note the Disk #-, i.e., Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 3, etc.

To identify which disk to select-in order to proceed with-issue the command DiskNumber. Replace DiskNumber here with the actual number of your disk. For example, to make Disk 1 offline, issue the command "select disk 1."

Run the command to set the disk in offline mode.

This message, "DiskPart successfully offlined the selected disk", will be displayed; this means the job has been successfully executed.

Just chose the disk number and repeat the steps mentioned above to get the disk online again. Then, run the online disk command. You can even use the DiskPart utility to bring the very same disk online much more agilely. 

3] Disable/Enable hard drive using Disk Management 

Here are the ways to turn off a hard disk in Windows 11 using the Disk Management utility:

Now, open the Disk Management app by using the Win+X menu, search box, or via your preferred method.

You will notice that the attached disks will show up in the bottom left corner of the utility.

Right-click one of the hard drives and choose Offline from the context menu.

The moment I take that disk offline, the disk goes down and 'administrator-set policy notification also says the disk is unreachable'.

Right-click the hard drive and choose the Online option from the context menu to bring it online onto the network. The disk will then appear under the This PC area and would be accessible.

4] Take a hard drive offline/bring online using Windows Terminal

Here's how:

Open Windows Terminal on your Windows PC as administrator.

Open a new tab, open Windows PowerShell profile.

Type in Get-Disk and press Enter to list down all the available hard drives at this moment.

You will be able to see data about those disks, including but not limited to numbers, health status, and operation status - whether online or offline. Note down the number that you need for that disk; this may be any number starting from 0 to 1.

First, open set-disk. The command to take the disk you want to offline is going to be, DiskNumber -isOffline $true. Activate it simply by replacing DiskNumber with the actual number of the disk you intend to work on - 0, 1, 2, etc.

To reconnect at later times, go back and follow steps 1 through 4. The last thing you run is this command:

Drive setup -isOffline DiskNumber = false

You only need to replace the instance of DiskNumber with the actual number of your disk to make your disk accessible again.

Now that you have learned how to take a Drive Offline or bring a Disk Online in Windows 11, we hope you get a lot out of it.