Low level formated hard disk drive isnt recognizable after restart

[Samerra Kraft]

hello i curently low level formated my 80GB external hard disk drive and when i restarted the system windows doesnt recognize it anymore what can i do when in the device manager it recognizes it but when i open my pc the drive is not there, all i know is that before i closed out of the low level formating program it said to particion the hard drive and then reformat it again but how do i do that i simple ran out of ideas with standard windows tools any help would be greatly appreciated among other things thank you for your time and pacience...

anything right now woudl be great and other things summit anything that you have check my profile for why

 

[bigfysh3]

From the sound of it, you need to go into the Drive Management and initialize the drive. You will need to partition it and format the drive afterwards.

 

[Paperdoc]

I am intrigued with your term "low level formatted" - as I understand that term, no user can do that - it is done by the manufacturer at the factory. However, any new blank drive needs two operations on it to prepare for use under Windows. As Bigfysh3 says, they are Partition and Format. Partition sets up a small data table at the very beginning of the drive with info on how many Partitions exist on this drive, where does each start, and how big is each one? Even if there's only one Partition, this is required. After that for each Partition created (whether one or more), each must be formatted separately. Format establishes the Root directory and a tracking table for the use of disk "allocation units" by files.

Tools for both these tasks are in Windows Disk Management. My experience is in Win XP; others are similar. Click on "Start" in the lower left, then on the right near the middle, RIGHT-Click on My Computer. From the ,menu choose Manage and, in the resulting window on the left, expand Storage (if needed) and click on Disk Management. On the right you will see two windows. The upper one will show you all devices currently in use - like, your hard drives, DVD drive, etc. The lower one (It SCROLLS!) will show you these, PLUS any other devices not yet ready for use, like you 80 GB drive. RIGHT-click on that drive and choose the option to create a Partition on it. This will be the drive's Primary Partition, and I expect you will want it to use all of the drive's space in one volume (you can choose to make a smaller volume and come back later to make another Partition in the Unallocated Space) and it will NOT be a bootable drive - just for use for data. Complete the settings you need, then tell it to proceed.

When done, RIGHT-click again on this new "Drive" and choose to format it. For options, choose the NTFS file system and either Full or Quick Format. Quick Format does all the essentials and takes a few minutes. Full Format does the Quick Format and then goes right through every sector of the drive and tests it, marking any faulty ones so they'll never be used. A Full Format is a safety measure, but it takes many hours so plan to let it run!

When you're done, escape back out of the menus and windows and reboot your machine. You should now see the new empty drive in My Computer, ready to use.

 

[Raviolissimo]

I am intrigued with your term "low level formatted" - as I understand that term, no user can do that - it is done by the manufacturer at the factory.

it's been about 10 years since i've had to do this. i used a WestDig low level format utility in 1997, on one of their drives.

there's one tool for it.
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2006.04.12-HDD-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

 

[Samerra Kraft]

hello i curently low level formated my 80GB external hard disk drive and when i restarted the system windows doesnt recognize it anymore what can i do when in the device manager it recognizes it but when i open my pc the drive is not there, all i know is that before i closed out of the low level formating program it said to particion the hard drive and then reformat it again but how do i do that i simple ran out of ideas with standard windows tools any help would be greatly appreciated among other things thank you for your time and pacience...

anything right now woudl be great and other things summit anything that you have check my profile for why

well as one user said you can find the lowlevelharddisk format from pcguru and well i downloaded particion magic and walla if was good as new again thanks for all the repleys i have officially resolved my own problem using common sense!!!