External drive not recognized after Moxi DVR format

Hello,

I have an external hard drive (Seagate Free Agent) that doesn't get recognized by my computer. This drive was connected and formatted by a Moxi DVR at one time and I'm thinking the problem is Windows just won't recognize the file format, whatever it may be, therefore not recognizing the drive as a whole. It doesn't show up in My Computer or Windows Explorer or anywhere that I can find.

I'm fairly confident there is nothing wrong with the drive itself. I say this because my brother is having the exact same issue. He also had a Moxi that recently died and his pc won't recognize his external drive either. His is also a Seagate Free Agent.

Is there any way to have Windows recognize these drives so they can be formatted in to something useful? I'd hate to have paid that much cash for an odd looking paper weight.

Thanks in advance.

 

Try Start>Run and type in diskmgmt.msc and hit <enter>. Does the drive show up in the graphs with a disk #?

 

Thanks for the quick reply sach2,

I just tried that and no, it does not show up there either.

 

If it isn't seen in disc management then there isn't much you can do. It has to show somewhere to be formatted.

This is a USB external correct? It doesn't require external power? Try connecting it to one of the rear USB slots as they generally have a bit more power than front USB ports.

You could try a third-party boot disk with a partitioning utility to see if it recognizes the drive. You would burn the ISO to a blank CD as an image file and then boot from the CD and see if it recognizes the drive. If it does then you could format the drive to NTFS and then try Windows again.

Imgburn has the option to "Write Image File to Disc" which will burn the ISO to CD making it bootable.

Partition Wizard (39mb) http://www.partitionwizard.com/partition-wizard-bootable-cd.html
Gparted (140 mb) http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php