I pulled a 1TB drive out of my unRAID tower and I would like to use it as an external HD for my PC. I put it in an enclosure and connected via USB to my win7 PC. In disk management it shows up as a "healthy partition" but when I right-click, I get no option to format the drive (greyed-out). I already filled the slot in my unRAID and it is at disk capacity so putting it back in and preclearing this 1TB is not an option. Is there anything I can do with this drive now, or is it destined for the bin?

Right click and delete the partition, then create a new one and format it.

 

Or use the clean command in diskpart.

First thing I would do is to open the Win 7 Disk Management utility again and report EVERYTHING that is is saying about what it is finding on that drive.  (I am assuming that you are looking at a 'Removable' drive rather than your WIN7 hard drive.  That utility can be very dangerous as it can instantly wipe a disk clean!)  The status entries (actually these are the system level formatted properties of the partition) for that drive could be the key as to why Windows does NOT want to format that drive! 

Right click and delete the partition, then create a new one and format it.

 

Or use the clean command in diskpart.

 

That was it, thanks.

 

 

First thing I would do is to open the Win 7 Disk Management utility again and report EVERYTHING that is is saying about what it is finding on that drive.  (I am assuming that you are looking at a 'Removable' drive rather than your WIN7 hard drive.  That utility can be very dangerous as it can instantly wipe a disk clean!)  The status entries (actually these are the system level formatted properties of the partition) for that drive could be the key as to why Windows does NOT want to format that drive!

 

The drive was empty except for the RFS. I just wanted to convert it to use for PC files.

 

Thanks for the quick response.