IT question

I fully understand that this is not an IT forum but recognise that many members have IT knowledge. So I have a question that someone might be able to quickly answer, before I have to resort to the rabbit hole of a specific IT forum.

I have an external SSD drive I would like to connect as a backup device. As far as I am aware I haven’t previously used this drive so there should be nothing on it. But when  I plug it into a USB port on my desktop it is not recognised. This happens on both Linux and Windows machines. It does power-up from the USB port but doesn’t show in file manager.

Thanks for any advice.

Dunno Linux, sorry, but of you open up disk management in computer management in windows does it show there?

It may be that it’s not formatted or is in a weird format. Although I thought Linux was pretty good at reading most formats.

Obviously formatting it will wipe any data that is present.

In Windows, right click the Start button and select “Disk Management”. That will show you whether the disk is recognized and whether it is formatted and partitioned.

Okay, Disk Management shows the disk as ‘Not initialised” so presumably I need to format it

presumably I need to format it

Yes, right click on it and you should get options to create a volume/partitions etc. Once you have done that, you need to format it.

Thanks guys. Drive now partitioned and formatted xt4 on Linux. I can now access in Dolphin (file manager)