My new 3tb WD My Book Studio HDD isn't recognised by Windows 7

My Dell desktop operates Windows 7 Home Premium and had an initial Hard Drive of 1.5TB (7200rpm) SATA. I’m trying to install a 3TB Western Digital My Book Studio external hard drive, with which I intend to store photographs and videos. The new HDD operates via USB 3.0. 

I can find the disk within Disk Management and it is flagged as being “Online”. However, the system is failing to allocate a Drive letter to the disk. I’ve tried the Microsoft solution of adding a drive letter but to no avail.

Any advice or assistance on how I can resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Hello and welcome to the community,

The My Book Studio comes formatted as HFS, which is Mac format. I recommend you format the drive as NTFS so Windows can recognize it.

How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows (8, 7, Vista, XP) and Mac OSX

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Thank you for your welcome, prompt response and for your solution.

Brilliant! It’s done the trick and that’s me on my way. Thanks again.

Hello,

Glad to know that you have your drive working on your Windows computer.