Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Format External SATA Drive

I just bought a Seagate SATA 250GB HD and an external SATA enclosure on eBay. Windows 2003 recognized the enclosure in Device Manager but the HD did not show up in My Computer. Reason being the drive was uninitialized and unformatted (since its new).

So how do you format a drive that does not show up on My Computer. Normally, a new HD connected directly to IDE shows up as unallocated drive in My Computer which you can then partition and format. However, what do you do when its connected to USB?

After half hour of playing around, the answer was simple enough:

1. Start -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management.
2. The HD will show up as Disk1 (unallocated)
3. Right click on Disk1 and select Initialize.
4. A Wizard will walk you through initializing, partitioning and formatting.

I partitioned it into 4 primary partition (maximum allowed by NTFS).

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much. I was about to go ask the computer store to format the dame thing for me...

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for this useful info.

I was trying to my format, but now its ok.

Anonymous said...

thanks fot this I did this 2 years a go and forgot wher to look,Cheers

Blackout said...

MANY thanks for this, been wrestling with a SATA drive all evening.

I'd be stuck if I didn't have the laptop to plug it into as an external and format it that way.

Formatting now :D

Cheers again!

Anonymous said...

Thank you verymuch, I was going to open a laptop to fit the new harddrive onto it, then format and take out.

Cheers,

Blessen

Anonymous said...

Thanks! You saved me from a real "I told you so!" headache.

Anonymous said...

You Are The Man Dude, I was looking for this for so looonggg.. Thanks a Bunch