How to format an external hard drive that my PC doesn't recognize

This type of error can occur for multiple causes and does not allow our PC to recognize the our external hard drive.

A clear example of these possible causes is that it does not have a letter assigned or a partition has not been created for it. It is also possible that it has a corrupt format or that it is also a new disk and you need to format it.

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The truth of it all is that these outdoor units where we can save information and transfer it to another computer are very useful and necessary.



And knowing how it works and what we should do in situations like this is timely. Since if you lose valuable information contained in your hard drive, you know how to recover deleted files.

How to format an external hard drive that my PC doesn't recognize

It is possible that the external hard drive is not recognized by our PC, due to a connection problem with the USB port. S when connected and it is not detected or does not produce the typical sound when a USB drive is connected. So we need to do the following to make sure the drive appears in the system.

What we will do then and we will go to the Device Manager, to do this we go to the Windows Start menu and right-click.

In the options menu we are going to choose Device management. A window will appear on our screen with the list of devices that are connected to our PC.


The next thing we will do is click on Disk drives so that its list appears and here we need to find the external hard drive.


If a Exclamation point on this device, we will right click and in the menu choose Update Driver, if while performing this operation the problem does not go away, we need to try the following steps.


Steps to format an external hard drive that my PC doesn't recognize

It is possible that this problem is due to the fact that it is a new external hard drive and it does not have a format, so we must do the following: first we will connect the hard drive to our PC.

Then we will go to the Start button of Windows and we will right-click and in the options menu we will choose Disk Management.

Here we can see that our external hard drive is not formatted and we have to give it to it, for this we will click on the Accept option that is displayed in the window to format it.


We will also see that a graph is shown in the window and it is in black, now we position ourselves on it and right click and we will go to select New simple volume.


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A wizard will appear on the screen, with which we will go to format the hard drive, follow the instructions and assign it a letter. The next step is to format it and in this case it will be the NTFS format, so we need to name it and click on the Next option. And we can end up with the magician.


After finishing this process, we can check that the hard drive appears and in blue it indicates that we can use it. This way we came to the end of this interesting tutorial which showed you how easy it is format an external hard drive that my PC doesn't recognize.

TagsTutorial PC
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