External HDD Enclosure Problem

prodgod · 09 Apr 2010

I bought a Western Digital Caviar Green internal hard drive and a generic hard drive enclosure. I installed the hard drive in the enclosure just fine and when I plugged it my computer, it installed the driver just fine, but when I go into "Computer" there is no drive listed for me to format. I know the enclosure works fine because I have another internal hard drive from an old computer which I put in there and it showed up just fine (already formatted though.) Is there something that I am missing and how would I format the hard drive so I can use it?

Thanks,
Mike

DocBrown · 09 Apr 2010

Start

Computer Management

Disk Management

See if HD shows up here

prodgod · 09 Apr 2010

There is a "Disk 1" in there that says it is unallocated and is 1863.02GB (the HDD is 2tb). Is that it?

whs · 09 Apr 2010

It probably has no drive letter. Maybe it is not even initialized. Go to Disk Management and assign a drive letter.

prodgod · 09 Apr 2010

How do you initialize it? I'll try that when I get home from work and add a letter and see if I can format it then.

DocBrown · 09 Apr 2010

Just follow what whs shows above.

Here is another snip from mine of the sub menu

not so gray matter · 09 Apr 2010

You can also use a program like Partition Wizard to fix this issue. Disk Management should work just fine, but Partition Wizard has a few more features. If you do use Partition Wizard, open the program with the hard drive connected and then click on the unallocated space. Click Create Partition and then choose whatever size and formatting you want. Once you hit ok, you also have to hit apply on the left hand side of the program. You can also set a drive letter via Partition Wizard.

Mellon Head · 09 Apr 2010

If it's a USB connected external enclosure, it still may not work with Disk Management, but I'm not sure about Partition Wizard. I used to have a USB enclosure, and I put a new 320 GB WD drive in it, and no way would that thing initialize. I had to take it out and connect it to a SATA port on the motherboard and do the partition and format, then put it back in the enclosure. It worked fine after that.

It's in an eSATA enclosure now, so no problem, but the OP might be having the same initialization problem I had. That was my work around, and it can be used as a last resort if necessary.