500gb Appearing as "Unknown Device"

Hey there, everyone.

I have a 500gb WD HD that I’ve been using pretty reliably for a while now. My PS3 recently started bugging out, so in order to back it up I had to reformat the HD into FAT32.

I was reformatting the HD through command prompt and it reached about 25% completion when the CP stopped and stated, " The media being formatted has been removed or has become invalid. Format aborted."

Now the device is only recognizable as Unknown Device. All I want to do is reformat the drive back to NTFS so I can use it as a HD again, but I can’t reformat something that is only being recognized as Unknown Device.

Any hints?

Try using a software to format the drive

I like this one

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/SwissKnife.shtml