I have a USB2 40GB external hard drive I got for backing up my internal 40GB HDD. It worked fine until I tried to reformat it from FAT32 to NTSF. The formatter said I couldn’t perform the format as another device was using it. After that the drive no longer appears in “My Computer” or “Disk Manager”, but does appear in “Device Manager” where it says the drive is working properly but unreadable. My backup format software sees the drive, but the drive letter is missing and it won’t let me reformat. I’ve tried everything I could think of but no dice. I’m thinking I need to take the drive to a shop for reformatting. Can anyone please give me some advice on this?

Could be a problem with the format actually. I’ve had troubles with NTFS before. Did you have a couple of partitions on the Fat32 format?

My internal drive is NTSF.

I’m fairly sure I just need to reformat the backup drive (no data to worry about). The problem is I can’t reformat it if I the computer can’t see it (no drive letter). Someone know of a program out there that could find and reformat it?

Hi,

I had a similar problem with an external hard drive, it would not be recognised on my second computer.

Try RUN… DISKMGMT.MSC

and assign a drive letter

Thanks for the suggestion, but it won’t appear in disk management. It does appear in device manager, which does me no good.

Out of curiosity, can you see the drive when it’s connected to another computer (assuming you have another)?

Yes gr00vy0ne, I finally had a friend plug the drive into his computer and he had the same problem with it. It did allow him to begin a reformat process, but quickly got an I/O error message.

Now I know for sure something is wrong with the drive and it’s not my software. I ship it back today for replacement.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[quote author=“Low Bat”]I ship it back today for replacement.

Is it too late to ask if you’ve tried a different USB cable?

Yes it’s shipped already, but I did try the second cable and it yielded the same result.