Problem: Operating system does not recognize the 2 Tb drive. (HDD = hard disk drive)
At its root, this appears to be a Partition related problem. After plugging in the power cord, you may not see the small blue light on the front of the drive. This is normal. This is not unusual. The surprise is that WD does not provide this set of steps to correct the problem.
Solution:
- Disconnect any other external HDD using their USB connectors. Depowering is inadequate.
- Connect power cord at both ends. Do not expect to see any lights on the HDD.
- Connect the USB cord from the HDD to a USB port on the computer. Do not hook the HDD to an external multi-USB port regardless of whether this is separately powered or not.
- The problem appears at this time when your operating system fails to acknowledge the new drive. Note also that when you connected the USB cable, you can see that the HDD is being powered due to the lights inside of it. It also has a very quiet hum. It definitely is powered.
- On your Desktop, Right click on Computer.
- Click on Manage (Pause)
- Click on Storage (Pause)
- Click on Disk Management (Pause) More information appears. This list presents the drives that the operating system recognizes and sees as connected. Previous (now disconnected) HDDs will not appear on this list. What you will notice is that, in addition to your present internal HDDs and optical drives –identified by familiar letters- you will now see one or two or three ‘unidentified’ drives. No Volume and no File System. One of these entries will show two or three thousand Gb. This is the 2Tb or 3Tb drive you have just connected. At the bottom you will see all of your other recognized drives listed.
- The header on the box containing your new drive (showing 2 or 3 thousand Gb) will be blue. You are about to delete all of the company provided software (which will actually be of no value to you anyway) and format the drive. You do not need the WD backup app. There is nothing you need to save. Since there is very little on the drive, this process will not take one minute to accomplish.
- Right click within the box (labeled New Volume) and click on Delete Unallocated Space.
- Right click on New Simple Volume. Continue clicking on Next until you get to Finish (about 5-6 clicks). Click on Finish.
- The new HDD is now recognized, formatted, assigned a ‘letter’ and available for use.
During this process, you disconnected all other external HDDs. Reconnect these now. Note that your drive letters will now be changed due to the newly recognized drive. This is to say that if you previously had a ‘K’ HDD, for example, this drive will now be recognized as your ‘L’ HDD and the new HDD seen as ‘K’. Check to see if software previously using a ‘K’ drive will now use the new assignment. If not, you may need to visit Setup for that program to make changes. For example, I backed up to ‘K’ HDD. Now this is ‘L’ HDD. I had to make the changes to keep things on track.
NOTE: Internal HDD letters and optical drive letters are not affected during this process.
Since failure to recognize a new HDD may be caused by several other reasons, Western Digital does not provide this set of steps to get things back on track. If you wish to partition your new HDD later, use whatever means you are comfortable with to do this. It is now just another high capacity drive.
