WD My Passport external usb drive:
Made the mistake of using the drive as backup on a Dish TV DVD while the DVD was being updated. Dish formatted the drive to THEIR format. Now I would like to return the drive to PC use, however, I cannot find a way for reformat it. Windows doesn’t see the drive, but utilities show the drive with no drive letter or partition.
My question is, is the drive now junk or can it be salvaged?
You might have success with a partition manager program (such as this one), but be very careful with such programs as they are serious stuff and can do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.
Make sure you’re working on the drive you think you are, and should be.
Try Disk Management in Windows and Initialize/Format/Re-Partition the drive back to something the PC recognizes.
I’ve formatted hard drives on PS4 Consoles in Sony’s FORMAT … the drive will not appear anywhere on a Windows PC afterwards … except in Disk Management where it’s easy to get it recognized again on the PC.
The 1 terabyte usb hdd in question was formatted by a Dish tv dvr.
When I tried to return it to PC use, neither Explorer or Disk
Management in Windows 7 or Window 10 could see it. No drive letter
or Disk number, nothing.
I played around with a half dozen or so hdd utilities, some of
which appeared to do ‘something’, but did not totally fix the
problem.
After receiving a couple of messages from the WD community, I
decided to try Window Disk Management again, and suprise, one of
those utilities I tried must have done just enough to let Windows
see the drive. It appeared as “Disk 1”, with a hex type number as
the label.
I was able to successfully recover the drive with Disk Management.
Thanks for the help.
The 1 terabyte usb hdd in question was formatted by a Dish tv dvr. When
I tried to return it to PC use, neither Explorer or Disk Management in
Windows 7 or Window 10 could see it. No drive letter or Disk number,
nothing.
I played around with a half dozen or so hdd utilities, some of which
appeared to do ‘something’, but did not totally fix the problem.
After receiving a couple of messages from the WD community, I decided to
try Window Disk Management again, and suprise, one of those utilities I
tried must have done just enough to let Windows see the drive. It
appeared as “Disk 1”, with a hex type number as the label.
I was able to successfully recover the drive with Disk Management.
Thanks for the help.
You might have success with a partition manager program (such as this
one), but be very careful with such programs as they are serious stuff
and can do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.
Great to hear 
