Deleted Primary Partition, Can't Find External Harddrive in "This PC"

[ThatOneIdiot]

I was trying to install Windows 10 onto my external usb harddrive, when I had accidently reformatted the drive due to the media creation tool, which assumed it was an USB and as I said formatted it to FAT32. On discovering this I Deleted the Primary Partition, which was the FAT32 Formatted partition and unfortunaltely can't find / have access to the drive. I have tried to format the drive though the disk management but cannot, however the drive is recognized as the disk management picked it up. Can anyone help me find or reformat the drive? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help / advice.

-ThatOneIdiot

 

[USAFRet]

1. You can't (easily) install Windows on an external drive. Nor should you...performance will suck.

2. For the external that is now FAT32, simply DELETE whatever existing partitions are on there and start with a blank drive.


Now...what are you actually wanting to do with this external, and why?

 

[ThatOneIdiot]

Now...what are you actually wanting to do with this external, and why?

~Aight, long story short, my main harddrive has recently failed and I was trying to get my PC up and running temporarily while I bought an SSD

 

[USAFRet]

Now...what are you actually wanting to do with this external, and why?

~Aight, long story short, my main harddrive has recently failed and I was trying to get my PC up and running temporarily while I bought an SSD

That's not going to work.

Do you have any other drives apart from this external?

 

[ThatOneIdiot]

That's not going to work.

Do you have any other drives apart from this external?

What do you mean? ATM I'm going to install Windows 10 onto a USB. There should be no issue.

 

[ThatOneIdiot]

I changed the format or type of drive to GPT after clearing all allocations, created a new volume and fixed the issue. Thanks for any help I received.

 

[USAFRet]

That's not going to work.

Do you have any other drives apart from this external?

What do you mean? ATM I'm going to install Windows 10 onto a USB. There should be no issue.

And that is a non-trivial procedure.
Windows really does not want to be "installed" on a USB connected drive.
You can use a USB for the installation, via the MediaCreation tool.

But to actually install Windows to that external drive is a whole other thing.

During a normal install of Windows, a USB connected drive won't even show up as a target drive location.
There are ways, but what specific procedures have you found to do this?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

That's not going to work.

Do you have any other drives apart from this external?

What do you mean? ATM I'm going to install Windows 10 onto a USB. There should be no issue.

Yes, there will be issues. For starters Windows is not designed to be installed on, or run from USB media. The one and only exception being Windows Go, which is only available in the Enterprise version.

 

[ThatOneIdiot]

And that is a non-trivial procedure.
Windows really does not want to be "installed" on a USB connected drive.
You can use a USB for the installation, via the MediaCreation tool.

But to actually install Windows to that external drive is a whole other thing.

During a normal install of Windows, a USB connected drive won't even show up as a target drive location.
There are ways, but what specific procedures have you found to do this?

Alright, first of all, don't jump to conclusions. I am using a tool to install the iso file to the USB. Hence installing windows to my USB. Likewise there should be no issue.

 

[USAFRet]

Alright, first of all, don't jump to conclusions. I am using a tool to install the iso file to the USB. Hence installing windows to my USB. Likewise there should be no issue.

"ATM I'm going to install Windows 10 onto a USB"
To me, and anyone else, that refers to actually trying to install the Windows OS on an external drive.
Not use the external drive to boot from and install on some other drive.

Terminology matters.

"Installing the iso file", IOW creating the Windows install routine on that USB, is a whole different thing than "installing Windows to an external drive".
Completely different.

So, running the MediaCreation tool from MS will build the proper install routine on that USB. Or Rufus will also do that.
Then, you need some other drive to install the actual OS on.
You can't use the same drive for both.