Solved Cant Assign New Drive Path To Unrecognized External HD

[rm taylor]

Purchased a new plug and play 2 TB external hard that is not showing up as an icon in My Computer in Windows 8. It shows up in Devices and appears to be working properly. Driver is up to date. When I go to Disk Management the external is also recognized there but when I right click on the partition window to assign the external HD a drive path letter the drop down menu selection required to do so is greyed out and I am unable to perform the function. Uninstalled the USB driver for the device and re-installed and still nothing. I assume that when I activated Windows 8 on this new laptop I running as an administrator. Checked the unit out on my old laptop which is running Windows 7 and the same problem occurred. Perplexed.

 

[MasterChief]

Format it in Disk Management first.

 

[rm taylor]

When I went into disk management this is what I saw...I need to correct myself as the computer is recognizing the partitions within the drive but has not assigned a letter and as such I am having difficulty figuring out how to re-format this disk...it came from the factory formatted as FAT 32

 

[MasterChief]

Delete the 200 MB and 1862.70 MB partitions. Then format the unallocated space to NTFS.

 

[alphanumeric]

Is the drive in question shown as drive 1 in disk management? I have set external drives up as Windows To Go Drives. One side effect of that is they don't get assigned drive letters unless you actually boot from them. Even after deleting all partitions and formatting them. I had to do a diskpart clean all to get them back to normal. If your disk is disk 1 it looks like Windows was installed to it. If its an external USB drive that makes me suspect it may have been setup as a windows to go drive and returned. Just a guess. If it was you'll have to manually give it a drive letter every time you plug it in until you do the clean all.

 

[rm taylor]

It would only let me delete the primary partition which I did. I then created a simple volume (all other options were greyed out) and was then assigned a drive letter which I selected. I then took the option of formatting to NFTS which I did and it worked. THANKS!

 

[alphanumeric]

I was just about to edit my other post. In my case I was able to assign a drive letter, you were not. I would go at it again and see if you can wipe the whole drive. If it was Drive 1 there is no point in having the EFI partition on that drive, its just wasted space. I would open a command prompt as administrator and run disk management and do it all from there. clean all would be my choice.
Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command - Windows 7 Help Forums