External hard drive non-responsive after formatting

[Bruce Phung]

I want to install additional 1 tb internal harddrive for my desktop. It is necessary to partition the new hard drive or it will show up as 1 big tb hard drive?

[Ervin Farkas]

It depends on the manufacturer; some come formatted and with one large partition, but most drives come not formatted/partitioned.

[Ervin Farkas]

Originally Posted by Ben Bruges

The drives are supposed to be NTFS. One registers as RAW the other as nothing. I don't have the option to reformat them. Both drives register fine with my Mac. I tested one on a Windows 7 computer and that had similar behaviour - recognised the drive (in terms of whirring and triggering the 'safe to remove' routine) but not accessible through Explorer.

NTFS does work in Mac if you add a nifty little application called Paragon NTFS, which enables the Mac to recognise and work with NTFS.

Try using a specialized software like Partition Wizard and see what will it report. I had one drive that did not show up in Explorer until I partitioned it with Partition Wizard.