recovering a external hard drive

i have an external harddrive that at one point i was using as such.... i then got a high def receiver for my tv and used the hard drive as a pvr... had to format it to run as a pvr.... now i no longer need it as a pvr drive and wanted to use it for my computer again... problem is my computer will not recognize it at all.... how do i fix it... would be a shame to have to throw it out

 

It's possible the drive was formatted with a linux file system. I assume this drive is connected using USB. Download Partition Wizard Bootable CD. Burn the iso with Imgburn. Boot the CD and see if it detects your external drive. If so, delete any partitions and then re-partition and format to NTFS.

How to write an image file to a disc using ImgBurn

 

is there anyway to do it without burning a disk? i don't have any disks to use

 

If you can boot from USB, download Partition Wizard Bootable iso from the previous post. Download YUMI. It is a portable application. Just unzip to the desktop in an admin account. Then Highlight Partition Wizard in the dropdown box. Check the box "Local Iso selected" and browse to the Partition Wizard iso file. Press the create button, making sure your flash drive letter is correct in step 1. This should create a bootable flash drive for Partition Wizard.

Note: The flash drive must be formatted to FAT32. Yumi lets you format the flash drive also. Make sure you do not have any data on the flash drive before format.

 

still having issues with this.... not sure i understand it.... not very technical when it comes to this sort of stuff.... i need an easy way to do this

 

When you say it's not recognizing it, how are you connecting this drive? Are you putting it into a drivebay? You might want to use a USB drive adapter. Then I would go into Disk Management, detect the drive and then format it from there to NTFS.

 

it is being connected via usb and i have tried the disk managment route... all the options to do anything with the drive are not highlighted... so i'm at a loss

 

Download the windows version of Partition Wizard. Open the program and see if it recognizes your USB drive? If it does have a linux file system, hopefully it will see it.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Partition_Wizard_Home_Edition_d6175.html

 

thanks that worked...

 

Glad you got it sorted and thanks for the feedback. Do you remember what the file system was on the external drive?