Please help with new external hard drive

I recently bought a MyBook Western Digital 500GB external hard drive to store my music and video files. I wanted to change the file system to NTFS (it comes pre-formatted in FAT32). Now I think I may have screwed up. Instead of going into start, run, command, and converting, I right clicked on the drive and formatted the whole thing to NTFS (4096 byte allocation). It literally took 7 hours (500GB drive). Now my laptop (vista) only recognizes it as a mass external storage device. I would at least like the drive to turn on and off with my computer when plugged in and back up my system settings/files. I am a newbie, so please take it easy on me.

1. How bad did I screw up?

2. Is it still possible to fix my problem?

 

You might have deleted some firmware or other files that where on the drive.

Go to western digital home page and try finding firmware or a managment program for your drive. You didnt screw up bad. Should be easy enough to restore it.

 

A hard drive is just a block device. There's no such thing as "critical files or firmware" that could have been affected by re-formatting the drive.

Sounds like yet-another-vista-bug.

 

Do as Wave said, there might be a special utility for doing this.

 

So whats wrong again, i did the same thing with my WD external, it was fat32, so i just reformatted the whole thing, and now its just a regular External HD, without the WD junk..whats the problem?

 

OK, I'll try it when I get home and see what happens. I know there is a utility so the drive shuts on/off with the computer. I saw that one as well as a few others.

Right now, if I turn my computer on with the hard drive plugged in through the usb slot, the screen stays black, the minute I unplug the usb port my desktop comes right up in a few seconds. I can then access it by plugging it back in.

Should these utilities be installed into my main drive or the external drive? Hopefully the programs tell me if I don't hear from all of you first

 

P.S. Why do they come in FAT32, isnt it basically obsolete? i couldnt even fit some of my files on it when it was fat32 because they were more than 4 gigs or something...

Is there any reason not to use NTFS

 

the reason they use FAT32 is cause its compatible with all OS's i think, but i don't think you can convert a HDD format without re-formatting your computer. Now i would try the following...

1. Use GetDataBack for NTFS, and just scan your HDD and see if there are any WD files which are the utilities or w/e and restore them

2. Plug in the HDD to the wall individually...
"The drive worked initially, but then suddenly and seemingly without reason stopped working. XP would only recognize a "USB Device" and then launch the driver wizard. XP SP2 had no driver for it, and neither did WD's site (that I could find). I did an internet search and found a posting where someone had my exact problem, called WD and was told to plug it into the wall directly. BINGO! As soon as I did that it was recognized again; and come to think of it I *had* plugged more stuff into that power strip when the drive quit working. I experimented a bit, and I could reproduce the problem by plugging it into a power strip with lots of other devices, and the problem went away as soon as I plugged it in by itself or on a less crowded power strip. I hope the other reviewers that had this problem had a chance to try this before returning a perfectly good drive"

-newegg user

 

I did the same but just used the Quick format option and defaults; total time 5 minutes then ran the utilities to check SMART codes.

If I read it right you lose the "fuel guage" when you go NTFS however the green circle flashes during read writes. You can turn the drive on and off buy pressing the round front button. Occasionally I have to unpug it to turn it off or on after a restart. The drive seems to auto spin down after 15 min or so of no activity. I accidently brushed the front button during a write and the darn thing shut off..so much for "smart" switches. My Free agent Pro does the same while the docs say it's not so. The Seagate has ajustable spindown via software if your into video or other.

Drives (two) have been running fine including the one which fell, not running, onto ceramic tile and broke the cheezy plastic case YMMV

Cheers