External Hard Drives Not Showing Up

essenbe said:

Please upload a screenshot of Disk management as WHS requested. And you can also try diskpart. Open an elevated command prompt (click start, in the search box type cmd, on the cmd entry right click it and select run as administrator. In the window that opens type diskpart and press enter, in a few seconds, it will reply diskpart. Type list disk then press enter. it will list all disks connected to your machine giving each one a number. Type select disk # (where # is the number of your external drive. You can tell by the size or usually it is the last drive listed) example is 'select disk 3'. it should respond with disk 3 is the selected disk. If you get this far, type 'assign' and press enter. That should assign it a drive letter and make it visible in computer (windows explorer). type exit and enter, twice.

I tried the above but when I got to "assign" and entered it said "There is no volume specified. Please select a volume and try again".

whs said:

You apparently have a 1.8GB drive without a drive letter. Unfortunately it does not show in the lower pane. Does it show there in RAW format?

How do I get it to show in RAW format?

whs said:

I think you misunderstood - I was only asking whether it did show as RAW.

No it didn't show as RAW
, this 2TB I have only just bought tonight and looking at it it is the same as the SimpleDrive that is not recognised.

whs said:

OK, understand. This drive you have to first Initialize and then you have to define a partition on it in order to show up in Cpmputer. I suggest you define a relatively small partition on it and leave most of it unallocated for later use.

But the I: drive should show in Computer - does it?

Yes the I drive shows up in Compuer.

whs said:

OK, understand. This drive you have to first Initialize and then you have to define a partition on it in order to show up in Cpmputer. I suggest you define a relatively small partition on it and leave most of it unallocated for later use.

But the I: drive should show in Computer - does it?

How do I initialise the hard drive?

whs said:

Go to disk management. In the left pane in front of the drive in question right click where it says Disk0, Disk1, etc. But check first whether it is already formatted in NTFS. If that is the case, right click on the right pane and define a partition - as small as practical.

PS: Just checked in your Disk Management snip. That drive is not yet formatted.

Disk Management kept freezing up but I did a quick search on microsoft and got it working following trichard13 advice.
Thanks for your help whs, it was probably me trying to explain my problem

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...d-beda4bab2671