Need Help With Creating Hard Drive Volume

Alrighty, I swapped out my HDD in my laptop for an SSD and put the old drive in an external enclosure. I didn't think to use Windows installation to wipe the old drive first; I just planned to do it within Windows on another machine.

Well when I plugged it up, it popped up the drive and the system reserved partition, as two different drives. I tried using Windows to format them together, but I could only format them separately. I Googled around to see how to do it, and found something about deleting the partitions in disk manager. Okay, no problem.

Until I did it....now it's not showing up as a hard drive. Device manager sees it as having 305GB of unallocated space (correct, it's a 320GB drive), but I can't get Windows to recognize it as a drive in My Computer or Disk Manager.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. And if this post makes no sense, feel free to ask more questions.

Thanks guys.

Try going to the device manager under your hard drives. You should be able to access it from there.

Control panel>administrative tools>computer management>disk management>Right click on the right-hand side graphic for the respective disk showing the drive size, select "new simple volume", select options to format as you see fit in the wizard.

hafa said:

Control panel>administrative tools>computer management>disk management>Right click on the right-hand side graphic for the respective disk showing the drive size, select "new simple volume", select options to format as you see fit in the wizard.

Click to expand...

That's the thing, it's not showing up in DISK manager, only DEVICE manager.

benny428 said:

Try going to the device manager under your hard drives. You should be able to access it from there.

Click to expand...

It shows up in the device manager, and even under hard drives, but I can't do anything with it. I can go to properties and it says it has 305GB unallocated space, but I can't figure out how to create a darn partition.

Black C5 Z06 said:

That's the thing, it's not showing up in DISK manager, only DEVICE manager.

Click to expand...

In the computer management MMC while in disk managment, try clicking on action>rescan disks. The disk should show on the left-hand side as Disk x (where x is the number of the drive). You may need to right-click on the left-hand side and initialize the disk.

hafa said:

In the computer management MMC while in disk managment, try clicking on action>rescan disks. The disk should show on the left-hand side as Disk x (where x is the number of the drive). You may need to right-click on the left-hand side and initialize the disk.

Click to expand...

No-go. Doesn't show up after 'rescan disks' either. When I plug it in, the thing in the task bar shows up, and Windows makes the toast sound, AND it shows up in device manager. But no matter what I do, it doesn't show up in disk manager or my computer.

See the Fujitsu drive in the device manager? That's the drive I'm wanting to get working.

Okay, got it working as a drive (had to use another computer and create a new volume in a weird way. Not sure I could do it again if I had to lol.

But I have a new problem. When I format it, it has a total of 298GB (that's fine), but FRESHLY formatted, it's only saying 297 of 298 is free. I guess it's just me being OCD, but that really bothers the hell out of me.

Any ideas?