I can not figure out how to view my hard drive as it will not show up in 'my computer' I've searched all over the internet trying to find a solution but to fix one problem, the other problems have to be working fully which doesnt help. each problem needs each other to work to succeed. *first problem- i cannot clear readonly to remove write protection *second problem- i cannot initialize or anything without the write protection gone *third problem- diskpart will never let me see the details of the disk because of it not being up to date, and it doesn't matter how many times I close diskpart or restart my laptop My laptop is running Windows 7 64bit and the portable hardrive is a WD, i do not know the model or anything else

Here are a few more things to try: Firstly, go to Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Folder Options > View Tab and confirm that there is a tick in Show drive letters. Right-click Computer, click Manage > Storage > Disk Management, then right-click on the graphic of the drive that may be 'hidden' or unallocated > Change Drive Letter/Paths... > select a letter from nearer the end of the alphabet > OK and the disk should show in Computer. Use another letter if it stays hidden. If, in Disk Management, a new drive has no options to create a partition, is there a red symbol to the left of the graphic image? If there is, right-click it and initialize the drive.

Once you clean the disk, you cannot format until you create a partition/volume. While using DISKPART, do the following: select disk 1 clean create partition primary select partition 1 format fs=ntfs (or fat32) quick

Hi, According to the sequence Darien provided. Here are two articles can be referred to. A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415 DiskPart http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770877(v=ws.10)Ivan-Liu TechNet Community Support