Was a question about getting such drives ready to use. Maybe I'm dodging the bullets by removing partitions on such drives, creating a new one and letting the OS format the new drive.
Those that just pull it out of the box and start using them tend to make posts like yours.
Bob
I just bought a western digital 500gb essential external hard drive, plugged it in to my usb2.0 port and it was recognised by "my computer", disk management and device manager. Only problem is it says it needs to be formatted as its RAW data. I know it doesnt need to be as i took it over to my mums house and it worked fine on her pc and she even managed to put a couple of photos on there. She is running win xp home sp2. I'm running win xp home with sp2 as well. I tried running chkdsk and this is what i got:
C:\>chkdsk e: /f
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is New Volume.
CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File record segment 4 is unreadable.
File record segment 8 is unreadable.
File record segment 9 is unreadable.
File record segment 10 is unreadable.
File record segment 11 is unreadable.
File record segment 12 is unreadable.
File record segment 13 is unreadable.
File record segment 14 is unreadable.
File record segment 16 is unreadable.
File record segment 17 is unreadable.
File record segment 18 is unreadable.
File record segment 19 is unreadable.
File record segment 20 is unreadable.
File record segment 21 is unreadable.
File record segment 22 is unreadable.
File record segment 23 is unreadable.
File record segment 24 is unreadable.
File record segment 25 is unreadable.
File verification completed.
As you can see it says its NTFS but has unreadable segments. This is a brand new hard drive (bought 2 days ago) and i have yet to be able to use it. Any suggestions (apart from taking it from the casing as its under warranty) on how to get it working would be helpful.

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