Hey guys, I got a WD 2 TB Passport to use for my Xbox One. Well I realized you have to make a partition for the Xbox to recognize it so I looked up how to do it on my PC. Anyways I made it as far as shrinking volume in Disk Management but I put the wrong amount to partition. So in trying to figure out how to delete the created partition I tried deleting the volume which ended up in deleting the whole drive and now my PC won't recognize the external drive.

Please let me know if there's a way to fix this so my PC can recognize the drive again!

@colourful_hippie: Instead of mucking about with the Windows tools, I always use Mini Tool Partition Wizard. It's freeware and pretty powerful. Creating partitions is super easy, and pretty self explanatory.

I don't know of any graphical tool to make that super easy and user safe, but using the commands outlined in this article should do the trick.

However make 100% sure that you select the correct disk lest you format your boot drive or some other plugged in usb device. http://www.howtogeek.com/235824/how-to-clean-a-flash-drive-sd-card-or-internal-drive-to-fix-partition-and-capacity-problems/

If you have data you want to recover from that drive, then stop any kind of write operation to it and report back, someone will surely know of some good tools you can use.

@an_ancient: It's a brand new drive. I'm just trying to get Windows to recognize the drive again so I can actually partition again. I'll take a look at your article

@colourful_hippie: The program I linked should recognise it.

I'd try a third-party tool like @dave_tacitus suggests. I don't think you can actually damage the disk using Disk Management, so it shouldn't be a big problem. Probably just something weird with Disk Management.

Also, I'm pretty sure the Xbox One will just do whatever formatting is required to us it. Have you tried plugging it in there?

@dave_tacitus: ok then using the tool @dave_tacitus just mentioned should do the trick

Going off of memory right now, I think you have to go into Disk Management and "initialize" it again.

@an_ancient: Was able to keep going till I cleaned the drive from the command prompt. Wasn't sure how to proceed from there. I went ahead with @dave_tacitussuggestion and used the program. I had to guess on whether to use MBR or GPT when setting it back up ([picked GPT) and it seemed everything was ok with being able to partition the drive but this only worked because the drive was only recognized in the freeware program or in the command prompt. It still didn't show up like a drive normally would on PC but whatever for now because the Xbox is recognizing it now.

I would have thought so because that was my first step but nope

Thanks guys!

@colourful_hippie: Sometimes Windows 7-10 stops mounting the drive i.e doesn't assign a letter and it won't show up in My Computer. You have to assign a letter by right clicking the partition in Disk Management. That is unless Xbox formats the drive in a weird way.