Formatting An External Drive

S

sandboy

New Member
Hi, this is my problem. I removed the hard drive from my PC and put it into an external enclosure so I can make use of the drive on my Windows 7 laptop. When I connect the drive to the laptop USB socket Windows finds new hardware
and installs drivers.

The drive is shown in the Device Manager as a Generic Void Disk USB Device which is working properly, but it is not shown under Drives in My Computer. All I want to do is format the drive and use it for storage, can this be done? It`s an IDE 200 MB drive.
 
Under disk management, right click the partition you want to format and just choose format.
 
voyagerfan99 said:
Under disk management, right click the partition you want to format and just choose format.
Click to expand...

Hi VF99 thanks for helping, I followed your advice and ran the Windows Disk Management Tool and it finds the external drive as > Disk 1 unknown not initialized you must first initialize a disk before logical disk manager can access it.

When I next right click to initialize I get an error message that the device is not ready, how would I go about making the device ready?
 
Hi the drive was working fine before I put it into the external case and the Device manager reports it is working properly so I think its ok, I can hear it running when I switch it on. Might be as its an IDE drive and my laptop has a SATA drive.
 
That won't make any difference.

Since you're just looking to format it anyway, try right clicking the partition and just delete it. Then create a new simple partition and format it.
 
Yes 200 GB. I tried to delete the drive but there is no option to delete it in the
Disk Management Tool. I downloaded a utility called Mini Tool Partition Wizard to try and format or delete the drive but Mini Tool crashes every time I plug in the drive in the usb port.
 
You should be able to do it directly from Windows in Disk Management. I don't understand what issue you're having.
 
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