Unable to see External HDD in Windows Explorer

Posted by Jamie Keeling on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Jamie Keeling
Published on 2010-03-09T13:54:51Z Indexed on 2010/03/25 8:43 UTC
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Filed under:

windows-7

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external-harddrive

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partition

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formatting

I have bought a 320GB External HDD which I want to use with my Playstation3.

I know it will only work with a Fat32 file system so using some free HP software it formatted it, unbeknown to me it will only work up to 32GB.

After seeing this I panicked, downloaded Partition Wizard Home Edition and deleted the partition.

As I was about to create a new partition to put it back to NTFS (I'd just wanted to be able to use it in the first place at this point) I accidently knocked the cable out of my computer for the HDD and after replacing it the External HDD is no longer recognised by the My Computer option, Disk Management asks me to initialise the disc using MBR but it fails saying "Copy protected".

Even the partitioning software I previously mentioned can't do anything about it, all it says is "Bad Condition" and I can't perform any operations on it.

Would anybody be able to guide me in getting this sorted? I'm terrified i've wasted a perfectly good 320GB HDD.

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