I’ve clicked to delete the partition by mistake and now I am unable to locate the WD hard drive. Now when I enter the the hard drive via the USB 2.0 port on my PC on a windows 7 operating system and also my XP on my other PC I get a message when trying to set it up again on the WD smart programme and the message reads NO WRITABLE WD SMARTWARE PARTITION FOUND.
What do I do?
u need to go to disk management and format the drive from there ( make sure you ok with loss of data from passprot drive) …
Thanks for the infomation. I just bought a WD My Book Essentials 2T and I noticed after getting home that it had been opened before. Well when I did the plug and play it did not work and would not let me install the software telling me that it might be formatted on operating system. So I am guessing someone installed the hard drive on another operating system ( I have Windows 7) and then returned the hard drive back to the store. Well I did what you said it and went into Disk Management and right clicked on the hard drive that did not assign a letter to the hard drive and deleted the volume (I was nervous doing this) and then went back to Disk Management and right clicked on my drive and clicked “Format” and now it works like a charm and I can see my hard drive in My Computer and add files . Once again thanks.
I had the same problem and it took me a couple of days to figure out I had to reformat and repartition the drive. What I had done was use a WD utility to “zero” out the data. It zeroed out everything. I have XP and it’s done from the device mgr. I forget exactly what steps to take and it may be slightly different for your operating system. But you should be able to get help from windows by searching for format, device manager, partition. If you can’t find it from windows look on the web. Even though explorer can’t see the drive, the device manager will be able to see it as long as it connected. BTW, by doing this you’re going to lose all data. As far as I know it’s your only option. It shouldn’t be too big a loss if your main drive hasn’t gone during the interim. Also do a quick format unless you want windows to check the drive for errors, sector by sector. It takes a long time that way. Best of luck!