# Rescue external drive from Hopper formatting (Windows 7)



## Keniff (Nov 25, 2013)

I made a post asking for help with this and got some welcome replies, but none really gave the instructions on how to do this. I figured it out through search research on the web.

I have come back to share this with the community. You all have tried to help me before and I appreciate it. I want to give back by sharing this:

After allowing Hopper to format a brand new 2TB EHD (External Hard Drive), I learned here that it is recommended to stick with Dish’s recommendation to use an externally powered hard drive instead of the USB powered one I had purchased.

When I tried to use that Hopper formatted EHD as a computer backup drive it could not be accessed due to the Hopper formatting being a different language…or something like that. So it had to be reformatted. Sounds simple, just right click on the drive and reformat right? Nope! The drive doesn’t show up in your drive listing to make it possible to do that even though it will show up in device manager on the computer.

Here’s how to rescue that drive for another use:

Windows 7 Professional:
-Plug the EHD in to a USB port and allow to power up.
-Click “start”.
-Right click “computer”
-Click “manage”
The computer management window opens
-In the left cell or pane of the window, find “Disk Management” under the “Storage” section and click that. It will take a minute to populate the drives. This “drives” information now splits the center cell or pane of the “computer management” window.

In the lower portion you will see the drives.
First in line for me is “Disk 0 Basic” with three partitions. This is my computer’s hard drive.
Then below that was the EHD. It was liabled “Disk 1 Basic” as I recall. This made sense and was identifiable by the size of 2TB whereas my on-board hard drive is 500gig. There were 4 partitions on that EHD formatted by the Hopper. They were called “healthy.
Below that there was Disk 2 (I think it was called) “Removable (E Yours may have a different number or letter depending on the drives you have.
Then below that there is “CD-ROM 0 DVD (D

In the upper portion you will see all of the partitions of both hard drives in one list.

Go to your EHD in that lower area and one by one right click each partition and select “delete volume”. A warning comes up “the selected partition was not created by windows and might contain data recognized by other operation system. Do you want to delete this partition?”
Select “yes”. After you have done all of them, all partitions will be gone and you will have just one solid area where those were.

That drive/single partition will now be labeled “Unallocated”.

Right click where is says Unallocated, then select “new simple volume”. Answer yes to all questions without changing anything in those windows when they come up. It will now format the drive.

I didn’t have to unplug and re-plug…it just showed up ready to use as a drive.


This makes it a basic “Dumb Drive” without any of the stuff for synching or management software it may have shipped with, but I don’t use that software anyway and usually delete it from any drive I buy if possible anyway.

It may be possible to obtain that software again from the manufacturer’s web site if you want. Your mileage may vary. But this gave me my drive back after Hopper formatted it. Toshiba was willing to replace it even though it was my fault for allowing Hopper to format it because it had been such a recent purchase but this saved me the hassle of the claims process.


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## Grandude (Oct 21, 2004)

The only thing I would add to your 'most excellent' description on how to reclaim a hard drive is I always rename all active hard drives on my PC's. In my case, the primary drive on my PC is named CrucialSSD240 which is also a complete description of what that drive is. I have a second normal hard drive which I store all the data from various programs and have renamed it WD500 which is what it is, a Western Digital 500GB hard drive.

By doing this, when I go into 'disk management' it is easy to know what each drive is. So when adding another drive, it will not have a name that I have assigned to it and will be obvious which drive I might want to reformat to the Windows system.


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