can't format my external hard drive

[hbob16]

I looked at some of the other posts and didn't find any solution for my current problem, so here it is:
My XP computer has recently decided to give up (i think the motherboard is bad), so I bought a new HP desktop that comes with Vista. I pulled out my old XP hard drive (which is partitioned into 2 virtual drives) and want to use it as an external disk. I used an external usb enclosure and pulled all my data off the drive (note the disk is working properly, no issues). By using the Vista Disk Management tool I was able to remove all the volumes and delete all the partitions (I was trying to merge it back into 1 disk). Now I have 1 memory chuck labeled as primary drive. When I try to format that drive I get an error saying something along the line of formatting was not completely or not successful.
Has anyone had this issue before? I have a Hitachi drive, but as I've mentioned it was working with Vista before I decided to unpartition and delete all the volumes. It does show up as a drive in my computer but since it is not formatted successfully I can't use it. I tried to do the quick format as well as the full format.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

You have to create a new partition before you can format.

Connect the old drive up directly to a M/B port (IDE/SATA) on your new
computer. Can you work with it from there? If not, the drive is likely bad.

Did you creat a partition & format it within Disk Management or?

[hbob16]

I did create a new partition. I just put that drive inside my new machine. Tried the quick format, same error, now I am doing a regular format. Anyone have any other ideas?
Thanks for those who replied

The regular format worked *sigh*. I don't know why it wouldn't work over usb. Thanks for all who tried to help.

Try deleting all old partitions. Then create a new one and format the
partition.

Does it work? If not, what is occurring?

[inspectorjimb]

I know this is an old post, but I thought I'd still add my 2 cents in since I was searching online for ways to fix the same problem and couldn't find a solution that didn't involve removing the drive from the enclosure and installing it direct to the motherboard.

I had run into the same problem and had tried time after time to format the drive while it was in the enclosure via usb only to get error messages or crashes.

Finally I was able to make it work by deleting the partition in the disk management console and then creating a new simple volume on the disk but restricting the size of the partition to about 5 gb's (on a 320 gb hard drive). Miraculously this worked and the drive came up. After words, I right clicked the volume and went through the "extend volume" wizard to expand it to almost the full size of the disk.

[Lord Haart]

I registered just to say thanks to inspectorjimp for sharing that. You saved my 1TB external. :-D