External hard drive gone?

Status
Not open for further replies.

spledang

Distinguished
Apr 2, 2009
91
0
18,630
Okay, so I was trying to change my External hard drive that is a FAT32 to an NTFS. I saved all my stuff on to my internal hard drive, then deleted everything contained inside. Afterwards, I followed these steps in this link below

http://thundercloud.net/infoave/answers/external-hard-drives-ntfs.htm

It states to "Right-click on the drive you are changing (make sure it is the right drive), and choose "Delete Partition"."

Me being as dumb as I am... I right clicked the external and saw "Delete Volume" and it made my hard drive disappear completely. Is there anyone that knows how I can have it reappear? I replug it in and i see that it is recognized as a USB device in the "Device Manager." I still cant find a way for it to appear as a new hard drive though. I'll be doing research to try and find the problem, but if anyone has any solutions I'd much appreciate it. Thanks in advance
 
Solution
Right click on the drive in disk management and select initialize. Create a new partition the full size of the drive, then format it as NTFS.

spledang

Distinguished
Apr 2, 2009
91
0
18,630
I figured it out thanks. I did something similar to the steps you posted. What are the negatives to having an NTFS over a FAT32? Besides the fact MACs cant transfer stuff on to NTFS hard drives.
 


NTFS has way may positives than negatives. It's a jornaling file system so is less suseptable to corruption than FAT32. It can store files over 4 gig, which fat32 can't, and more.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.