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Vista / Windows 7 External Drive Formatting and Setup.
Connect the external drive to your PC and turn the power on. You will notice that the drive doesn’t show up in “Computer”. This is because you will need to initialize the drive and format it first. The following instructions will go through this process so that your external drive will show up in “Computer”. Click in the Search box at the bottom and type “computer management”. This may take a while depending on the speed of your computer however it will eventually show up in the programs list. Click on “Computer Management” under programs. Next click on “Disk Management” under “Storage”. You might have to click the triangle next to “Storage” to expand the directory. You may get this pop up, if you do skip to step #4. If you didn’t get this pop-up please proceed to the next step.
Locate the disk that needs to be formatted. You can do this easily by checking the size. In this case, the disk we will be formatting Disk 1. Right click inside the box that has the Primary Partition. It will be the box that has the drive letter in it. In this case it is (G:). Once you right click in the box, you will see the menu shown in the screen above. Select Delete Volume from this menu. After selecting Delete Volume from the previous menu, you will be prompted to confirm that you want to erase the drive. Select Yes from this menu. The volume should be deleted within a few seconds. The window that contained the Primary Partition should now say Unallocated. Right click inside the box where it says Unallocated and you should see the menu shown above. Select New Simple Volume. On this pop-up click “Next”. Click “Next” again. Hit “Next” again. Here you can change the File System if you like “NTFS” is the default. Put a check on the box or “Perform a quick format” Then click next. Now click “Finish”. You should now see that the disk is formatting. Once the format is complete drive should show up in “Computer” as pictured below. |