[andrewanimation]

Hello,

A 200GB external hard drive (which I put together using a previously-internal hard drive) won't show up anywhere in my system when I plug it in, after it failed to reformat. I tried to reformat it in Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management, but, after getting passed 100% reformatting, an error message read that it failed to reformat. Then I tried to delete the partition, so I could recreate it and reformat it that way, but it said an error occurred. I restarted my computer, turned the external on and off again, but still, no drive to be seen anywhere--neither in My Computer nor in the upper or lower areas of the Disk Management utility.

Nothing seemed wrong with the internal hard drive when it was being used as an internal, and I hear it spinning in the external case, and I didn't touch it or make any changes at all while it was reformatting. I wouldn't even have reformatted it if I knew an error would occur, I simply figured I might as well reformat it since I was about to delete everything on it anyway, to prepare it to be used as a storage unit. But I figure a hard drive SHOULD be able to reformat when you want it to, anyway. What should I try?

Thank you

[alex]

Hi Andrew,

Sorry no-ones come back to you sooner, its the first time I've seen the post.

Was this drive originally the master internal or a slave? If slave have you adjusted the jumpers accordingly now it's used as an external?

Was the format you attempted into NTFS or FAT32?