Windows 7 - External Drive Showing Up As Local...

My 1TB Western Digital external drive is showing up as a local drive under My Computer after I formated it. How do I make it show up as removable storage again?

What did you format it to? (NTFS, FAT32)

I assume it is a USB device, correct?

Yeah, I apologize. It's connected via USB and formatted as NTFS.

Dave

check device manager to make sure the USB driver is working correctly (type device manager in search>go to USB tab)

Ken

That's all good. I tried to format it so that my Xbox would read it and, I failed, now It's showing up like this... The computer is reading it as it's plugged in, just showing up as a local drive not removable.

If you have your "My Computer" window set to "Show in Groups" it simply lumps USB HDs in with the other disk drives... it's no worry and nothing is broken.

Here's one of mine.... Thing works perfectly...



What likely changed is that when you formatted it the "Removable" flag in the drive's descriptor was reset.

Well, how do I fix it to show up as removable?

You don't. Honest... it's not broken and this is not a bad thing.

The only suggestion would be to go into device manager, find the external drive and right click to get the Properties dialog... Under Policies, click the Quick Removal option.

From there, just use it...