drive not found in windows explorer

[detski1]

   

Newly purchased buffalo 500g drive station is not recognized in windows explorer. 

I've got win xp pro, w/ a buffalo 300g drive station that is found no problem.

I can hear it connect (loud bong), but it does not display the standard, "found new hardware."  If I open computer management, then disk management it shows there w/ no drive letter assigned, layout=partion, type=basic, file system=blank, status=healthy (GPT Protective Partion), capacity=465.76gb, free space=465.76gb, % free=100%, fault tolerance=no, overhead=0%.

[Matt_M]

Sounds like it just doesn't have a file system assigned to it, if you right-click on it from Disk Management you should be able to go to format and quick format to NTFS.

[Tuomas]

Old thread but anyway... Maybe he can't assign a file system?

 

I have a similar problem with a 500 GB PEU-2 on XP SP3: the drive connects to USB fine but doesn't show as a drive in MyComputer. Device Manager shows it as a USB Mass Storage Device. Disk Management shows it as Disk: Online, Volume: Healthy (GPT Protective Partition) but all the right-click (or Action menu) items are blanked out., every one of them. There's nothing I can do to format it.

 

Something to do with GPT and XP? Any way to convert the partition to MBR or whatever? Note, this same problem appears when I connect the drive to a Windows 7 laptop so it doesn't look like an issue with XP to me -- I'll be glad to be corrected here.

 

This particular drive has been formatted to HFS for a Mac, then later to NTFS in Vista. It should have NTFS now but doesn't.  Is the file system hosed somehow? The data is expendable, I'd just like to get the drive back in use again.

 

[Tuomas]

Looks like I got it resolved. Downloaded the CD utilities, didn't get the whole package to install but found the DriveNavi.exe in the Buffalo folder, run it, then > Additional Software Installation > Disk Formatter > Physical Format. As expected, nothing else but Physical (low level format) was available, as the file system has been hosed by/via Win 7.

 

It's been formatting about an hour now, I reckon I better just wait until it finishes. It'd be helpful to see something in the tool about the progress, I understood from some other threads here that it can easily take most of a day on a 500GB drive. The ever refreshing progress bar doesn't really work like progress bars are supposed to (actually indicating the progress out of the entire task). But so far a happy camper anyway...