External USB Drive

[Guest]

I recently purchased an external USB housing, in which I installed a hard
drive out of an HP Pavilion that the mother board had died on. I attached it
to a Dell desktop running Windows XP Home. Upon connecting the USB drive, XP
found it and everything went well. I could access it via Windows Explorer,
work with the files, etc. The drive had two partitions, the main one and an
HP recovery partition. I wanted to delete the partitions and reformat the
drive into one new partiition. Following the instructions on the little
manual provided with the enclosure, I went into disk management and deleted
the existing partitons. I deleted the recovery partition first, then the main
partition. This was when I figured out that I had probably just made a major
mistake, as I can no longer find the external drive in disk management or in
Windows Explorer. I assume that after deleting the restore partition, that I
should have used the reformat option on the main partition instead of
deleting it. So, my question is, is there any way to get access to the
external drive now, or is it just gone? I would have just installed it in the
Dell as a second hard drive, but this Dell does not have that option. Any
help would be greatly appreciated.

DCL

 

[Richard Urban]

Create a new partition on the external drive and then format the partition.
Then it will be given a drive designation.

--

Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[Steve Jones]

I've run into USB drives that won't remount until their powered down, then
restarted. Shutdown the computer, unplug the power and USB from the
external, wait a minute, plug the wires back in, then restart the computer.
You should be able to reformat an external drive ‹ it isn't trashed.

 

[Guest]

Thanks to both Richard and Steve for your responses.

While in disk manager a bit ago, I hapened to note that below the disk
detail window are two graphical disk representations (which I had not paid
much attention to until now as ithought they were for the Dell) that show
Disk 0 39 MB FAT and (C 74.46 GB NTFS, which are the items showing in the
detail window. Under that one is Disk 1 basic 55.93 GB unallocated, which is
not showing in the detail window. Now that I noticed that and when I
right-click and select properties, it does show it as the USB mass storage
device. I am in the process of partitioning it as I write this!

Life is good again