Change Drive Letter & Paths Greyed out

I am still unable to access my WD 5000H1U external hard drive. It is showing in Device MGR & Disc Management. However when I access Computer it is not showing. When in Disc Management it is there ok but with no drive letter. Right click reveals drop down box but everything is Greyed out. The external HD is up and running ok with blue lights, I have even tried 3 separate USB cables but with no joy. I have checked the drivers and they are up to date...... When i first switched it on it did register ok in Computer but since then nothing. It works perfectly on my Apple laptop. I am running Windows 7 Home edition. Any help would be much appreciated. Lee

Has the drive been initialized?


To initialize new disks

1. In Disk Management, right-click the disk you want to initialize, and then click Initialize Disk.
2. In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select the disk(s) to initialize. You can select whether to use the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) partition style.

Note The disk is initialized as a basic disk.

Additional considerations

• New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it. If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk.

p3jason said:

Has the drive been initialized?


To initialize new disks

1. In Disk Management, right-click the disk you want to initialize, and then click Initialize Disk.
2. In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select the disk(s) to initialize. You can select whether to use the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) partition style.

Note The disk is initialized as a basic disk.

Additional considerations

• New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it. If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk.

My aim is to physically move a 1TB HHD from one a NAS to a 64bit win7 machine. Computer Management "sees" the disk, but when right clicked, all options are grayed out. I have tried several cold boots, no help. cowpatty

My aim is to physically move [or install] a 1TB HHD from one a old NAS to a 64bit win7 machine. Computer Management "sees" the disk, but when right clicked, all options are grayed out. Initialize not possible, due to the options in the drop down menu [from computer management>storage> right click] are grayed out. I have tried several cold boots, no help. The added drive shows up in bios.

Hi,

Not to sure if this will help but have you checked that the jumper settings on the 1TB drive are set correctly? i.e. slave and then ensuring that the BIOS boots from your 7 drive? Your drives may be conflicting at the hardware level?

Might be a bit off the track here but it was a thought.

Tom

I just ran into this problem and solved it. Seeing as no answer was ever given I thought I would share what I did.

I put a new 1TB harddive in my windows7 box.

Open the Disk Management console by typing diskmgmt.msc at an elevated command prompt. Or in Windows file browser right-click on "My computer" or just "computer" and click on "Manage". In the "Computer Management" window under Storage in the left column click on "Disk Management".

Right click on the disk that is not being given a letter. For me all the options were greyed out except "Delete volume". Given that I had no data on this disk, I chose this option. I deleted the volume and then reformated the drive using the wizard, and in this process the volume letter is assigned automatically. Hope this helps.

All options greyed out except help
Which is computer manager help - not specific.

Can't select anything.

Is there another way?
(CMD Prompt etc?)

To recap -
New Hard drive -
connected to the PC
Shows up in computer manager
with no letter assigned
when right clicking -
nothing is available

What you need to do is connect the drive to your mac and open disk utility. Then you need to format it to exFAT. Make sure you have all of your files backed up because the format will delete them. Then it should be recognized by your windows machine and if it isn't go to disk management and right click on your drive and assign it a drive letter.