I'm sure this has happened to all of us at some point. You've just bought a hard drive, or you've just taken one from your Mac or PS3, plugged it in to the PC and it won't appear in "My Computer".

Here are some easy steps to format the drive so that it's usable under Windows:

1. Click "Start"
2. Right-click on "Computer" (or "My Computer" in Windows XP)
3. Click "Manage"
4. Click "Disk Management" (on the left, under "Storage")
5. Find the drive in the list that appears in the middle, right-click on it and press "Format".
6. Click "Yes" and follow any instructions. When it asks what type of file system you want, choose "NTFS".
7. Your drive should now appear in My Computer and function normally.

Please make sure you've pulled all the important data off the drive, as this process will erase any data on the drive.

If you need to recover data from the drive before formatting the drive, I recommend using a Live CD, a tutorial for which will be posted soon.

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Re: How to Format a Hard Drive that won't appear in

by veato

Wednesday, 19 January 2011 10:10

IIRC it requests a reboot too, or at least it did in XP the last time I did one.

Re: How to Format a Hard Drive that won't appear in

by nick

Sunday, 23 January 2011 21:44

Worth noting, of course, that any file systems/data on the drive will be lost.

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