Hi: I had to reformat my hard drive and now my external hard drive is not being recognized by the computer. It's USB, but it was built by taking old memory, and buying a casing for it. I don't remember the name of the case. So, why is it not being recognized? It says USB Mass Storage Device, but the drive it not there. Please help. Thanks.
you need to initialize the drive right click my computer and go to manage... when the window loads go to disk management. your USB hd should be picked up in there as unpartitioned space. right click on it and go to make new partition. the wizard will help you do the rest
Alright Sypher: I did what you instructed, but I must have done something wrong. It does show up now as Drive G, but each time I click on it, it asks "Drive G is not formated. Do you want to format?" Of course I don't because I don't want to lose all the information I had on there. Please help.
Are you kidding? The whole point of backing up is to not lose information. But, why does the computer not recognize the external hard drive? It's there, but not there.
Eliza916 Quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I had to reformat my hard drive and now my external hard drive is not being recognized by the computer. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Are you speaking of your PC's HDD that you re-formatted? Do you have Windows XP with SP2 loaded? I asked this question before. Which hard drive did you re-format before, the internal one in your PC, or the external one?
The internal one. And yes, I did do all the Windows updates after reformatting. A couple years ago, I upgraded my 20GB hard drive to 120GB. So I took the 20GB memory cards, bought a case for it and my friend built it into an external hard drive for me. I backed up my hard drive before reformatting, but when I plug the USB to it, the computer does recognize the USB Storage Mass Device, but under MY COMPUTER, the drive is not there. So I did what Sypher suggested which did work, it got the G Drive up, but I cannot access the stuff on the drive. It keeps asking "Do you want to format?". Did I really lose all the data?
IMO, yes you did. That is why I asked the question first, which HDD did you format. Since you did your internal IDE there was no reason to do a partition on the external. Think of it this way, let's say that you brought your external HDD over to my house and I plugged it into my PC. I WOULD NOT had to do a partition on your external to read it! Doing so deleted all your data and now it's asking to finish up and format the drive. Maybe I am missing something here so I would ask SypherTek how to finish this up for you.
Ok, panic aside. If I did lose all the data, do I go ahead with the formatting? After formatting, will the external hard drive be usable?
hi eliza, when you do such partitioning this will cause losing your information for what i have experienced, so if you have no choice and it's already done the info is loss then try the suggestion of scubabud, format it and try it in windows xp sp2, it will be usable for sure because it is plug and play in sp2,then next time try to have another drive for backup just in case....
Okay, I have a similar situation. Today Windows stopped recognizing my external hard drive properly, so I went into Disk Management and did the partitioning and initializing thing that it prompted me to. Now I get the same request to format my disk everytime I try to open it, which I wouldn't want to do because I'd lose the data on the drive. But, if what's been said in this thread is correct, the data was lost when I did the partitioning and initializing thing. Which is a serious bummer because I had My Docs temporarily on the external drive (iTunes was taking over my scrawny 40G C. So, what now? There's ways to recover data loss even after a format, isn't there? What should I do?
lexu PM ddp if he doesn't respond to this thread. I am sure he knows of programs or vendors that can retrieve your data but most are extremely costly. I believe it will come down to actual $$ vs importance of data. One question, did you do the partition after reading this thread or before?
Pfft, before. Thanks for the suggestion. I'm calling the external HD manufacturer (Maxtor) to see what they can tell me now. I'll post an update if they provide any useful info, but I somehow doubt they will. I might add another thing I just noticed: In Disk Management, it says my external drive has 189G capacity (all free), but when I go to Device Manager and click to see the properties of the Maxtor drive, it says capacity is like 194G. Before this happened, I had around 5G on the drive and I think it was about 189G that was free then. Mean anything? (There's no extra 5G partition on the disk or anything that I can find.)
