External Drive does not show up in disk management

livingem · 15 Feb 2017

Hello
New Seagate external 8 TB drive. Did not format because it showed up in MY Computer. Drive crashed after trying to copy to it - it did show up in Disk Management,said "Disk 8 Unknown" "Not initialized." could not format. unplugged and replugged power and usb cable and restarted computer - no change. I right clicked and tried the option "offline." Now the drive does not show up in disk management.

Windows 7 Pro 64 bit

Please help. Thank you.

Sheila

Schrade · 15 Feb 2017

Do have 9 Hard Drives plugged in to your computer?

RolandJS · 15 Feb 2017

Schrade said:

Do you have 9 Hard Drives plugged in to your computer?

I think those drives are mostly partitions within the three physical hard-drives.

RolandJS · 15 Feb 2017

Have you already tried booting a Puppy Linux usb or dvd? I'm wondering if another OS will work with the HD, hopefully getting it ready to be read and used by Windows.

Schrade · 15 Feb 2017

RolandJS said:

I think those drives are mostly partitions within the three physical hard-drives.

Could be Roland, but the only place I've seen Disk 'x' in mmc is in the left column, bottom half of window. ???

'Initialization' ; that's Partition Table creation, isn't it? As opposed to 'Formatting'?

Can you post a screenshot there gem?

strollin · 15 Feb 2017

Maybe this MS article about using disks larger than 2TB in Windows will help: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...rger-than-2-tb

When the drive originally showed up in My Computer, did it show up as the full 8TB or some lesser size?

My guess is that you need to convert the partitioning scheme from MBR to GPT in order to format the drive and use the full disk.

Here's another article describing that process: Change a Master Boot Record Disk into a GUID Partition Table Disk

Schrade · 15 Feb 2017

strollin said:

Maybe this MS article about using disks larger than 2TB in Windows will help: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...rger-than-2-tb

When the drive originally showed up in My Computer, did it show up as the full 8TB or some lesser size?

My guess is that you need to convert the partitioning scheme from MBR to GPT in order to format the drive and use the full disk.

Here's another article describing that process: Change a Master Boot Record Disk into a GUID Partition Table Disk

Yep - betcha'.......

livingem · 16 Feb 2017

Thank you all for your responses. The drive is now showing up in Disk Management, although I did nothing except reboot. I have 8 drives in all. 5 are external drives. When I click on "Disk 8 Unknown Not Initialized", I get the "initialize Disk" window with MBR selected. When I select either MBR or GPt I get the same message: "The system cannot find the file specified." Thank you again.