External hard drive gone?

[spledang]

Okay, so I was trying to change my External hard drive that is a FAT32 to an NTFS. I saved all my stuff on to my internal hard drive, then deleted everything contained inside. Afterwards, I followed these steps in this link below

http://thundercloud.net/infoave/answers/external-hard-drives-ntfs.htm

It states to "Right-click on the drive you are changing (make sure it is the right drive), and choose "Delete Partition"."

Me being as dumb as I am... I right clicked the external and saw "Delete Volume" and it made my hard drive disappear completely. Is there anyone that knows how I can have it reappear? I replug it in and i see that it is recognized as a USB device in the "Device Manager." I still cant find a way for it to appear as a new hard drive though. I'll be doing research to try and find the problem, but if anyone has any solutions I'd much appreciate it. Thanks in advance

 

[Hawkeye22]

Right click on the drive in disk management and select initialize. Create a new partition the full size of the drive, then format it as NTFS.

 

[spledang]

I figured it out thanks. I did something similar to the steps you posted. What are the negatives to having an NTFS over a FAT32? Besides the fact MACs cant transfer stuff on to NTFS hard drives.

 

[spledang]

Best answer selected by spledang.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I figured it out thanks. I did something similar to the steps you posted. What are the negatives to having an NTFS over a FAT32? Besides the fact MACs cant transfer stuff on to NTFS hard drives.

NTFS has way may positives than negatives. It's a jornaling file system so is less suseptable to corruption than FAT32. It can store files over 4 gig, which fat32 can't, and more.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey