Thread: formatting my external hard drive help

Thats odd, normally drives like that come pre-formatted...

have you tried the Disk manager?

Right click on your my computer icon, click "Manage", go down to Disk management, and you should see your drive.

Should look like the attached image. "Akira" is my 80 Gig Firewire external

Right click on it, and click "Delete partition"

It'll whine and moan about lost data and such, click ok.

Then right click on the same partition, and click "Format"

Choose NTFS, as you DO NOT want Fat32 on a drive that size, 1kb files will take up anywhere up to 4mb (A full sector) just cause Fat32 sucks, Name it something kewl, and it SHOULD work.

Grumble Grumble Grumble

Close all your file windows, call up the help menu, and search for 'Disk Management'. run this application and see if you can format it... (Also, is your anti-virus protecting the drive?)

Also, if you want to be able to use the drive across different platforms (Mac, LINUX) FAT32 is a safer choice then NTFS

i did what aceman said but now that i deleted the partition, the hard drive wont appear when i turn it on....

Grumble Grumble Grumble

Once the partition has been deleted, you have to create a NEW partition, then Format it, so go back to Disk Manager and do that...

it doesnt show the 300gb hd in the disk manager...

Sigh...

Windows XP has issues with large format drives. I've never used an external USB Drive under XP that is that big, but i know I had a devil of a time getting XP to even see my 200 gig internal.

Go to the manufacturers website and see if they have a download utility that can help you. Most are pretty good about having some sort of utility that can see the drive, create a partition, and reformat it.

Here, check out this link:
Downloads Index - Seagate Technology

If it's a second internal then you need to download the windows install software. It should detect the hard drive and overlay it with software that will allow the entire drive to be used. If it's the master Hard drive (which it sounds like it is not) then you will need to download the iso and make a bootable cd rom from another machine.

If this does not work for you, then what are the stats your stats on the machine? Most important, are you running XP and does it have Service Pack 2 (SP2) installed on it?

Looking forward to hearing back from you....

Is this even a USB drive or did I imagine that somewhere?

Pre-Service Pack 1, Windows XP could only see up to 150 gig, but it could easily be fixed with a registry tweak, after service pack one came out, the problem was resolved. I know this because my copy of XP is pre-SP1, and balks when ever I have to re-install it on my 250 gig (I then use partition magic to resize it back to its 250 gig).