Hard Disk Woes

[mitch1423]

I have a 2 TB external HD and I used it with my DVR for a long time. I now want to use it on my computer, but because my DVR formated it, I don't know how to make it usable on a PC again. I've got EASEUS Partition Master Home, can I use this to fix it? If so, how?

[EvanED]

I'd play around with Disk Management. Open up Control Panel and find Computer Management and open it (make sure you are doing it elevated if you have UAC on, or you'll see an error about not having rights to the Logical Disk Manager), and choose Disk Management from the tree on the left. Does it show up there?

[mitch1423]

Yes it does.

[EvanED]

That gives you a niceish GUI for messing around with partitions and stuff. Probably what happened was either the DVR put in a new partition table that computers don't understand or formatted it with a file system Windows doesn't know, so you can try to create a partition and see what happens or format one that already exists. (Of course, you'll effectively destroy any data on the drive, but it sounds to me like you're not looking to save it anyway.)

[Pterodactyl]

If you can't do it from Windows for some reason, try booting a Linux distribution live CD and running GParted. In GParted create a partition table, and a new partition.

[Nick G]

If you can see it, right click and reformat it, either as FAT32 or NFTS depending in your OS

[mitch1423]

I've finally got it working, thanks guys.