Yes. The primary partition allows me to 'delete volume' and the unallocated partition allows me to create a 'new simple volume'. My guess (I am WAY out of my league here) is that the EFI system partition would still block me from accessing the drive even if I wiped/reformatted the remainder of the drive. Just a wild guess.
Download and install the free version of Partition Wizard. That should allow to to do whatever you want to the drive.
Success! I used Partition Wizard to reformat the hard drive as NTFS and it is now recognized as my F drive. I've already transferred files over and it works great. Big thank yous to both ignatzatsonic and DeaconFrost for steering me in the right direction!!!
Awesome...good news. That's a powerful little app, especially considering it's free.
I may be way off, but thought I would reply. I had a similar problem with my external USB hard drive. It would not assign a letter and sometimes did not see it at all. This only happened on my laptop. I followed many posts to delete my usb drivers, etc. Finally found out that the laptop did not have enough power to spin the drive through the USB port. Bought a powered USB hub and fixed it no problem. There's my 2 cents.
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