The restart is a clue there is some issue with your laptop. It could be bios, drivers or some app.
Thinking it over, since restart works, I'm going with the external is fine. You have to ask your laptop maker to check up on BIOS and drivers.
So I've done just about everything to try to solve this, so here I am. I recently got an external SSD for my laptop, plugged it in and installed some programs on it. Okay, so everything worked fine. One day I put my laptop into sleep mode and turned it back on and for some reason it wouldn't detect the SSD, and the program icons were blank. Unplugged it and plugged it back in, didn't work, the light for the SSD was on though.
I also went to disk management and it wasn't there either. It wasn't the cable because I tried a different one, and that wasn't it. The SSD worked fine on another computer. I have another external HDD which also didn't work on my laptop. However, when I restart it, the SSD seems to work fine. But the icons are still blank, unless I uninstall something on there and reinstall it. I have no idea what's causing this, and could really use some help. It's getting annoying to have to deal with this, especially since I'm using it for college

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