Connecting to Virtual Disk Service message in Disk Manager

Last Updated on April 22, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

I had trouble in Disk Manager the other day. It hung at the message that says “Connecting to Virtual Disk Service.” My problem happened with an SD card, but it can happen with any type of drive.

Here’s how I fixed it.

First, the background story: When I plugged the card into my computer’s card reader, the card didn’t show up in Windows Explorer. So I launched Disk Manager and it hung. It just displayed “Connecting to Virtual Disk Service” at the bottom of the window forever.

First I isolated the problem. I thought the problem was the card. So I closed Disk Manager, ejected the card, then launched Disk Manager again. It scanned all my drives, recognized them, and came up. No problems. Then I plugged the card in again, and Disk Manager recognized it and mounted it as drive G. At that point I could see it had a FAT32 filesystem on it, which was enough to indicate to me that the card was functioning.

That’s a workaround but it doesn’t really solve the problem, unless I just intended to reformat the disk. I didn’t, in this case.

To fix the problem, I pulled up Windows Explorer, right-clicked on the questionable drive (G in this case), and selected Check Filesystem for Errors. Windows zipped through it pretty quickly, since it’s a solid state device. Spinning disks will take longer.

Next, I opened a command prompt and typed chkdsk /f g: to get a second opinion on the drive’s health. Chkdsk reported no errors, which was good. Substitute your drive letter for g: of course.

Under some conditions, you may have to reboot for the filesystem checks to complete. Save your work before you reboot, of course. If Chkdsk reports errors and you need to recover files, here’s how.

That’s how you fix it when Disk Manager hangs with the message “Connecting to Virtual Disk Service.”

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