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

This tutorial will show you how to take a disk drive Offline or bring a disk Online in a Windows 11/10 computer. Once a disk becomes offline, it will remain inaccessible and can’t be mountable. An offline disk is also not visible under the This PC section and the navigation pane of File Explorer. In addition, you can’t initialize the disk until you bring it back online. To do this, we have covered the built-in tools in this post.

Before proceeding, note that a system disk can’t be taken offline. You can take another connected hard disk, portable disk, or USB disk offline. Also, you won’t get a warning or confirmation box (which I believe should be provided) before taking a disk offline or bringing it online as the action is taken directly. These options don’t work for removable media like Blue-rays, memory cards, DVDs, etc

The most important part is the data stored in your disk is not deleted or wiped out during this process. So, you will have all files and folders when you bring a disk online or take it offline.

How to take a disk drive Offline or bring a disk Online in Windows 11

There are four native ways to take a disk drive offline or bring a disk online in Windows 11. You must sign in as an administrator on your Windows 11/10 PC or laptop to use the options listed below:

Take a disk drive Offline or bring a disk Online using the Settings app
Take a disk Offline or bring it Online using the Command Prompt window
Turn off a hard disk or bring a hard disk Online using the Disk Management tool
Take a hard disk Offline or bring a disk Online using Windows Terminal.

Let’s check these options with step-by-step instructions.

1] Take a disk drive Offline or bring a disk Online using the Settings app

These are the steps to take a disk drive offline using the Settings app of Windows 11:

Right-click on the Start button and select Settings
Navigate to System > Storage > Advanced storage settings > Disk & volumes
You will see all the connected disks
Click on the Properties button of a disk (except the system disk or Windows disk)
Press the Take offline button in the Status section.

This will successfully take the disk offline and the Settings app will close automatically after a few seconds.

Later, to bring a disk online, access the Properties of that particular disk in the Settings app, and press the Bring online button available under the Status section.

2] Take a disk Offline or bring it Online using the Command Prompt window

To take a disk offline using the Command Prompt window on a Windows 11 computer, use the steps added below:

Run the Command Prompt window as an administrator using the Search box or another way
Execute the diskpart command that helps to create partitions, manage disks, etc.
Now run the list disk command. This will show a list of hard disks connected to your Windows 11 PC along with their Status (Online or Offline)
Note down the Disk ### (say Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 3, etc.) for the disk that you want to take offline
Execute select disk DiskNumber command to select the disk for the next action. Here, replace the DiskNumber with the actual number of the disk. For example, if you want to take Disk 1 offline, then use the select disk 1 command
Run the offline disk command.

You will see the “DiskPart successfully offlined the selected disk” message. That means the task is completed successfully.

If you want to bring the disk online again, follow the steps mentioned above and select the disk number. After that, execute the online disk command. DiskPart will successfully bring the same disk online immediately.

3] Turn off a hard disk or bring a disk Online using the Disk Management tool

For turning off a hard disk using the Disk Management tool in Windows 11, follow these steps:

Open the Disk Management tool using the Win+X menu, Search box, or another way you want
On the bottom left part of this tool, you will see the connected disks
Right-click on a hard disk and select the Offline option
The disk will be offlined instantly. This will also show The disk is offline because of policy set by an administrator message which indicates the disk is inaccessible
To bring the hard disk online once again, right-click on that disk and select the Online option. The disk will be ready to use and it will also be visible on the This PC section.

4] Take a hard disk Offline or bring a disk Online using Windows Terminal

The steps are as follows:

Open Windows Terminal as administrator on your Windows PC
Now open a Windows PowerShell profile in a tab
Type Get-Disk command and execute it to generate a list of available hard disks
You will see disk number, Health Status, Operational Status (Offline or Online) and other details for those disks. Note the disk number (say 0, 1, etc.) for the required disk
Now execute set-disk DiskNumber -isOffline $true command for the disk that you want to take offline. Here, replace DiskNumber with the actual disk number (0,1,2, etc.) and then trigger the command.

To bring back the disk online later, follow steps 1 to 4. In the final step, execute this command:

Set-disk DiskNumber -isOffline $false

Replace DiskNumber with the actual disk number and your disk will be accessible once again.

That’s all. Hope this helps.

Also Read: How to convert Basic Disk to Dynamic Disk in Windows PC

What does it mean to bring a disk online?

To bring a disk online means the disk is visible to the OS with read and write access. You can access the created volumes, create a new volume, access the data stored in that disk, etc. By default, all the newly discovered disks are brought online automatically along with read and write permissions. However, if a disk is offline, then you first have to bring it online to access it, create a new volume, and more.

How to make a disk partition online?

If you want to create a new partition or volume on a hard disk in your Windows 11/10 PC, access the Disk Management tool. Right-click on an unallocated region and select the New Simple Volume option. Continue the wizard and select the size of the new volume. Provide a drive letter and proceed to the next step. In the Format Partition box, format the volume with default settings, and select the Finish button.