I was in Best Buy the other night returning some merchandise and ran across the Geek Squad trying to fix one of their customer’s problems. The poor Geek Squad tech was plugging and unplugging a drive, refreshing My Computer and the drive wouldn’t show up. To a professional technician, this is a 1-minute fix. Unfortunately, this technician couldn’t seem to fix it and his Geek Squad screen wasn’t telling him all the details.

In more detail, you plug in a USB hard drive, Windows states that it found the hardware, installs the software and you get a “It’s ready to use”, but when you go into My Computer, it doesn’t show up.

Well, here’s a secret for all of you that have this problem:
Right Click on “My Computer”, select “Manage”. Go to the Disk Management section and you’ll see a disk that’s there, that is the size that you just plugged in, but no drive letter. (Disclaimer, this next part: Use at your own risk as there is potential for loss of data if done wrong) Right click on the drive, choose “Format” and go through the prompts (choose NTFS). Within a minute, your drive will be in My Computer, as it should be. Again, use the above at your own risk, because you could wipe a perfectly valid hard drive…

Why does this happen?
Every once in awhile, a hard drive makes it out of a manufacturers facility without being pre-formatted for you. It happens, on occasion for some odd reason. Another valid reason is that the hard drive was replaced at some point, either by someone else, or by the manufacturer and it wasn’t reformatted as it should have been.