Win10 Can't format, use secondary HDD?!

[czglory]

Its detected in bios, it was working prior to the reformat (win 7), and I can see it in device manager which say it is working properly. However, I cannot access the drive, and I can't right click format it. What can I do? I have tried the troubleshooting windows recommended to no avail.

 

[nukemaster]

What do you see in Disk Management(diskmgmt.msc)?

If a drive is new it would require initialization. This should not be required if it was already used with Windows 7.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, czglory!

When you installed Windows 10 on your primary drive, did you unplug the secondary HDD from the system? It's possible that an OS confusion would scatter some system files on the secondary drive and make formatting the drive a bit of a struggle. In such a case you'd need to start from scratch and reinstall the OS with the secondary drive unplugged from the motherboard.
If it's a brand new HDD, just as @nukemaster mentioned you'd need to initialize the hard drive first, and then partition & format it.

Hope this was helpful. Good luck!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[DigitalLie]

Hey czglory,

This sounds similar to a problem I had when I installed a new SSD to Windows 10. If the device doesn't show up in Disk Management then it may be you need to use 3rd party software to initialize the drive. I ran Ubuntu from a USB drive and used its Disk Management utility, the drive then showed up in windows and I was able to format it, no problems since. Check out my thread on the problem here.