External HDD

[excalibur666]

Hello,
I have a 250 iomega external HDD that when i boot it up in my windows 7 OS it asks me to format and it doesn't allow me to format in NTFS, only exFAT? And when i boot up the HDD in windows xp it asks me to format again but doesn't allow me to format at all, why is that happening? And many thanks in advance.....

 

[psaus]

The drive could be going bad.
I'm assuming that you don't have data on the drive? If so, go ahead and format in FAT32 under w7. NTFS is bad for external drives - easily corrupted when removing. You could go with exFAT, but I've not tinkered with this much.

If you're trying to recover/access data without formatting, then things might be a bit more tricky...

 

[RetiredChief]

If windows will ONLY allow exFat, and you can not use Fat31 or NTFS you will need to delete the partition on the drive and repartition and format the drive. You can try windows Disk manager to delete and repartition the Drive. Right click on MyComputer and select manage. On the right side select disk management then go to the disk and right click the USB disk.

Alternate method is to download a 3rd party Disk utility, or use windows diskpart Cmd from a dos propt (which is what I use - BUT THIS IS NOT FOT THE faint of heart).