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need to format a blank USB hard drive

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by tdevick

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I have a 40GB hard I took out of my (fried) desktop computer and put it in an external enclosure that converts to a USB hard drive. I hooked it up to my laptop and it worked fine. When I got the original computer, though, it had two partitions: one 30GB and one 10GB. I wanted to merge the two partitions without buying something like Parition Magic (since it's a one-time thing). So, I downloaded a simple, DOS-based tool from Microsoft that lets you do a few things with drives and partitions. It's very primitive.

The long and short of it is, I managed to logically erase my hard drive. It now has no file system, drive identication, etc. When I plug it in to my laptop it is not recognized as a drive (I don't see an additional drive under My Computer). If I go into My Computer->Manage->Disk Management, it shows two physical units - 1 and 2. It shows ~40GB avail on unit 2. I select unit 2, right-click, and I don't have the option to format it. I can only access the properties.

I don't care about the data that was on the drive; I just want to format it so I can use it again. Any idea how to do that?

4 replies

by charliespencer

I believe you have to partition it and mark it as active before you can format it. You should be able to do this in Disk Management.

by tdevick

The disk has no partitions on it at all. As far as Windows can tell from Disk Management, it's just a big 40GB block of nothing. I don't see any way in Disk Manager to parition the disk. If I click on the Actions menu, it has a Mark Partition as Active option, but it's grayed out. I don't see any obvious way to create a new partition.

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