[roraz]

Didn't know whether or not this was the place to post, but need some help with an issue I'm having with a Western Digital 250GB Passport external drive. I leant it to a friend who was going back to uni, but when I got it back, windows xp wasn't picking it up properly. It doesnt appear in my computer, but the system registers the usb device (hear the usb connection sound etc), and when i go to computer managment > disk management, it half sees the disk eg:

http://img258.imagevenue.com/img.php?ima..._428lo.jpg

so I cant transfer any files to it.

I rang my friend, who was being a bit coy about it, but mentioned that he was using something called nuke and boot to erase some drives and might have messed up somewhere.

Does anyone know a way to re-format the drive so windows xp will properly recognise, because I really need to backup some hd films lol??! Or is it goosed?

[roraz]

also device manager shows it as an unknown device!?

[g-a-c]

If your friend has run Boot and Nuke on it, then this will have removed all the data and partitions, which also matches with the screenshot you posted. You should be able to right click on the "Unallocated" area and create a new partition this way.

Are you sure the "Unknown Device" is related to the disk (i.e. does it disappear when you remove the disk) because it looks to me like the disk is actually working perfectly. The only reason it's not working how you expect is because your friend has wiped the disk clean.