"My Computer" will not recognize My Book external Drive

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hello, I know you probably get this alot. But I reformatted my Hard Drive and now it will not show up in the My Computer window. It shows in Device manager and shows in Disk Management but in Disk Management I get an error when trying to Reformat it. I have a 3rd Party program I can use to reformat it if that helps. I hope that I can fix this soon because I need to back up my files so I can reinstall Vista.

Thanks in advance,

Jake

2

Since you have no data on the drive, the easiest thing to do is to blow out the drive and format from scratch. You do this by doing a low level format (writing zeros) to the drive. WD makes a tool that can do this (It’s listed under most of the internal hard drives as Data Lifeguard Diagnostics). You could also try a third-party tool to do it.  Once you have done this you will need to initilize the drive in Device Manager, than format it.