External drive reformat troubleshoot

I deleted everything off my external hard drive when I was reformatting my computer. Now the external hard drive isn't visible when I go to My Computer. Any suggestions on finding and reformatting my external drive?

 

Okay, here are the steps I would try.

1. Click on start, right click on my computer, then click on manage.
2. Open up the "storage" tab in there by clicking the plus sign.
3. Click on Disk management and that will show you the hard drives that are currently connected to your computer. You should see your main hard drive and your external there.
4. Right click on your external drive, and hit format.
5. Use the NTFS file system, and don't do a quick format or anything like that.
6. Then it should be all good to run again.

Troubleshooting:
You may not still be able to see your drive because another drive could possibly be using the letter that the EXHD is assigned to, which happened on my mom's laptop, because her business network was labeled as "E" and so was the hard drive, so the hard drive would not load up.

1. If you still don't see your drive after formating it. Right click on the drive in disk management and click "change drive letter and paths"
2. Click on Change
3. Scroll through letters and find one that you know that your computer doesn't use.
4. Click OK.
5. Your EXHD should now work.

 

Thanks. I'll give that try.

 

Someone should sticky or subthread this. It's good info. Thanks again Stone825.

 

No problem. Just trying to help people out as much as I can.

 

Oh, and did you get your laptop?

I just know most of this because it happened to me when I just tried to delete everything off my hard drive a year ago (when I was 15). Then my mom's laptop is connected with her office network so drive "E" is taken. So I had to figure out how to swap drive letters.