I have a Maxtor portable ext. hard drive 250GB and i have been trying to format it but it says it cannot formate this

hello,

i advice format

Hi,

If you format your Hard Disk then all files will be deleted thats why if you insert your Hard disk to DVD player then it will show that the file is not available.

thanks

The message about it not being formatted means that at least some part of the drive is corrupt or the cable is faulty.
First thing to try would be to connect the drive on a different cable, see if it helps. If that doesn't solve the problem you're most likely looking at a faulty drive. Maxtor drives are quite well known for their low reliability.

Unless the data on the maxtor is very important You should format the drive, assuming you are using windows, go to my computer, right click on the drive, it should show the option to format. If the info is very important, my advice take it to a info recovery business.

Lee

If your system detects the connected device that is a good start. Was the drive formatted for another operating system? Certainly try the drive on another system and/or another drive on your system.

conect your harddisk to computer whch has windows xp.
Then go to start emnu then type in run 'cmd"

then you can see command propmt.
Then go to your external drive letter like f:
then type 'chkdsk /r"
then pres "y'
then it fix error on hardisk.
Aslo you can format it .
Just take backup of data which you need then right clik on drive licon and format it.then it works fine.

Hi Tys,

I had a similar issue with my Maxtor Basics portable 500GB drive. I hadn't formatted mine yet, but had heard there were issues, so decided to find out before I start. I even saw your post here looking for an answer. Finally, one of my friends told me the following solution, which worked fine for me:

Don't format the drive as any of the Mac OS Extended options, simply reformat it as MS-DOS (it should be one of the options in Disk Utilities when you choose Erase and go to the Volume Format dropdown list).

Your Mac should be able to recognise and use the drive in this format and it works for PCs. Transferring files between the two shouldn't be a problem.

A thing to note, though, is that these Maxtor drives apparently come ready-formatted as MS-DOS (mine did). But while my Mac recognised the drive, I couldn't copy files on to it. If this happens, erase this MS-DOS formatting with... MS-DOS. Don't ask me why this works, I'm not a Mac Genius, but now my Maxtor is trouble-free and can transfer files from PC to Mac and back again.

Hope this works out for ya!

K

click on the hard drive and use the disc manager to format
or right click on the hard drive properties and use the format tab

Hi - thanks for your quick response, much appreciated .........I will try again to explain!!

We have purchased a 250Gb Maxtor portable hard drive which I was told was plug and play. We have followed the instructions for connection but no drive letter is showing up and the external drive is lit up and making a constant beeping noise. The computer doesn't seem to be recognising that an external drive has been connected.
To test our computer out I have connected an 8Gb memory stick to the processor and it shows up as drive H immediately.
FYI - we have XP running on our machine.
Hope you can help!! Thanks

It maybe that your motherboard bios cannot support 250GB and needs an update, but caution applies here. The other problem maybe that you need to use the hardrive on the 'CS' (Cable select setting). Lastly if you already have a pc running, use this drive as the slave the go to the Maxtor website to make use of the diagnostic/formatting and partition tools.