i have a western digital 750 gb hard drive that i used on my dish network hd dvr i got rid of dish so now i want to use it on my laptop but when i plug it in
it shows that it is active but i cant access it to format it to work on my comp i know thsat my dvr and comp run different os sytems is there a way to format it back to the system i need to use it on my computer any assistance will be greatly appreciated thank you

Have you tried diskpart from cmd prompt?
If using win7 rember to run cmd as admin.
Just make sure you select the right disk before running the clean or clean all command.

Loki

99% the problem is elsewhere... on dvr it works fine, I bet