Topic: External Hard Drive not recognized anymore...

How do I convert my external Hard Drive back to NTFS after being formated and converted by the Wii U?

my PC doesnt seem to recognize it completely after the process

Any Advice?

Why are you switching between the two?

Your hard-drive has been formatted to Wii-U partition, and it cannot be recognized by other machines like PC or other home console. If you want to use the hard drive again on the PC, you have to reformat it for the PC. That's how it works I believe.

Your only solution is to buy a hard drive execlusively for the Wii U or PC.

once you use the hard drive on the wiiu, it formats the hard drive essentially locking it and its contents to the wiiu... the only eay to use it again on a pc is to get the pc to reformat it... which would cause you to lose everything the wiiu put on it...

I hope you didn't have anything on it prior to hooking it up to the Wii U =/

To answer the OP's question, depending on your level of PC skill, you can convert the drive back to NTFS using a partition manager program, such as GParted.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

This generally involves the creation of a bootable CD which allows you to change the stucture of ALL read-write drives connected to the PC - care must be taken when selecting the drive to be modified.
Since most partition manager GUIs are a front-end for a command-line program, you can be sitting there waiting for your selection to start executing until realising that it does nothing until pressing the sometimes-not-so-obvious Start/Go/Execute button.
Highly recommend watching a few YouTube videos on the subject or asking a PC-savvy friend if you're not confident.

Now, all that answered, the comments above kick in - you're sure you don't want to use the drive again with the Wii U because the NTFS low-level format won't let you use the drive as an addition system-storage drive for Wii U gaming.

you hook the hd back to the wiiu, it will just make the wiiu format it again

After researching about it, I found out that partitioning the hard drive would do the trick - I just used Disk Management

My only intent on using the hard drive for the Wii U was to see if it can play musics, videos and such but I found out that wasnt the case which struck me as unusual since its suppose to be a "next gen" console

Anyway thanks for the inputs guys

@teus yes

@gek Nintendo don't make movies, sell music, or have the world's PCs by the jiggly-danglies, they just make game consoles... that said, the browser behaves well with HTML5 and there's a 3rd party Wii U media server being developed with this in mind.

Check out:

http://vidiiustreamer.com/

It's a gaming console guy. You can still stream your content from PC through the web browser(I'm not sure how, but I know you can). Any of your other devices will get your music, videos, etc. playing.

... pssst... Scar... have another read of the post above yours and check the link...

That's pretty cool, and showed up fast. Seems like the go to thing for streaming stuff to your Wii U... Does the Wii U stream music and photos too? I probably won't use this much honestly, but it never hurts to have extra features, and be able to run them well at least.

Yeah, my advice is to buy a new hard drive excessively for the pc, thats why you drive doesn't recognize it, cus of the stupid stuff your doing, You don't format the drive then take it out of the USB and then bring it over to the pc and expect the drive to work.. Thats not how it works, buy a new drive only for the wii u or the pc. and stop messing with it pls.

I have a different problem. My wii u isn't recognizing my external harddrive anymore. I have used the same external harddrive since I got the console and now out of the blue it stops working.

but wait, can't someone make a partition that isn't recognised by the WiiU to avoid formatting that part? kinda like how Windows can't "see" Linux partitions.

Your only solution is to get an Amiibo, when they come out. I believe a 'Donkey Kong' will do the trick.

@jpfan1989 I think it's broken. I hope you have a back up for it. Otherwise RIP bro.

@gek00 So next gen is all about playing music and videos through the game console? Finally someone who realized that Power =/= next gen! Out of all seriousness though, the reason why the Wii U doesn't play Mp3 and video files is because Nintendo is cheapskate and doesn't want to pay royalty fees. If I want to play music or video, I'll just hook up my laptop.

@GuSolarFlare Switching HDD back and forth is just a hassle man. I'd rather work 2 hours extra OT and get myself another 1T HDD....

@Hy8ogen I know, just asked out of curiosity.