external HDD can't be initialized "the device is not ready"

Welcome to the Seven Forums! meem

I assume you are plugging the 3tb drive in by usb and not eSata port correct? You need to see the drive initialized by paying the Disk Management tool a visit. You can opt to bring down to bring down the Action menu and click the rescan if needed. (see attached image)

But once you spot the 3tb volume in the DM you simply right click on that to use the Change Drive Letter option. Windows will then detect and mount the volume on the drive as a new logical drive using the drive letter you select and be seen in Windows Explorer. Often you may also see a flashing popup notification that a new drive had been found as well.

Hello Bieffe Welcome to the Seven Forums!

If you just bought the drive new and it shows Windows/Mac compatible it will see an exFat 32bit factory volume on the drive you can simply reformat to NTFS and then right click on the volume in the Disk Management tool to use the Change drive letter option. Other drives may come with NTFS factory volumes you might also want to nuke off of the drive in favor of simply seeing a new NTFS primary partition put on yourself instead.

Simply doing that one thing will immediately see the drive appear in Windows Explorer or Computer. What this does is initialize the drive or in the case of a usb flash drive or memory initialize the device. The information that comes along with the drive like a quick start pamplet would explain this to some extent.

The main reason for the immediate error has nothing to do with a defective drive or Windows glitch but just the need to get the dirive initialized in order to make it available for use.

First you would need to look at the basic items since you are not seeing in the DM. If you simply forgot to turn it on... oops!

That happened to me when two ports on a usb hub simply gave out while having something charging by way of usb. I had forgotten that until nothing showed when turning the power on. Took a fast look to find the cord still unplugged and turned the enclosure off until plugged in.

Now if you haven't forgotten anything without realizing it and the drive is still not seen despite checking ac adapter at the wall outlet or back off drive casing, usb cord not only at the pc end but the end that plugs in at the drive end, and the on/off switch or button then you could be looking at either a bad drive if the casing has an led that comes on or a bad ac adapter if this was just bought where you can bring it back for refund or exchange.

While a bad drive should still allow it to be seen in at least the DM first before WE a totally dead drive is possible while nowhere near as likely as a DOA ac adapter! Or a contact inside the casing may have ended up with a cold solder point where the drive while enclosed there will never see power.

The "device is not ready" message definitely points to the drive being detected as an unknown device as Windows sees it but not available if the drive is not getting any power. In the Device Manager one idea besides looking under "disk drives" would be going to the menu bar>View to select the "show hidden devices" option there. If the drive is to be seen at all that would be the place to start unless you know the drive had been working before now.

Welcome to SF! Kraems

Is your external drive self powered or usb powered? Most see an ac adapter so they won't pull on the usb bus. But some however are usb powered.

When starting up the laptop without the external HS plugged in and then plugging it in you should see a flashing popup as far as how the Auto Play settings in the Control Panel or need to simply take a trip into the Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management tool to simply scroll down to the new volume found there and right click to change the drive letter. Once you select a letter this will initialize the drive and see the volume on it mounted as a new logial drive in Windows Explorer with the flashing popup usually to open for viewing, etc.

Hello karthick Welcome o the Seven Forums!

When you go back into the Disk Management tool trying clicking to highlight the external drive and going upto the Action tab on the menu bar to see if the Rescan option will help. The next step if the All tasks>format option fails would be opening up a command prompt and type the following commands.

At the prompt type:

DiskPart = starts up the DiskPart partition manager
List Disk = all hard drives will be listed as Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 2, etc.
Select Disk # depending on which will be found for that based on actual size
Clean = removes factory NTFS or exFat volume
Create Partition Primary = primary generally preferred over any extended volume even on storage drives
Format FS NTFS or Format FS=NT60 can be typed in lower case
Active = marks partition as active
Exit = closes DiskPart tool

If you see the sucessfully... type message you can close the command prompt and simply go back into the DM to right click and select which drive letter you want to have. You should then see the popup for new hardware found and possibly a prompt to scan the drive by the av program you are running.