Why wont my xbox recognise my new hard drive?

-I ordered a pre-owned 250gb black (I presume 'elite') hard drive for my Xbox 360 Premium console (no HDMI) but the xbox wont recognise it as an xbox hard drive when I plug it in using a transfer cable or when I plug it in the top of the xbox itself. Data can be transferred into it but only as a mass storage device not as an xbox hard drive. There was some sort of formatting option to allow xbox data to be stored on it which I tried but I gave up after 4 hours of the same screen telling me it would take a few minutes. Is this a common problem and if so how could I fix it?

The xbox will still recognise my 20gb hard drive and a 60gb hard drive that I borrowed off a friend.You or the previous owner formatted it into a regular mass storage USB device instead when it was connected with a transfer cable. Do so makes it unrecognizable as an official drive and, unfortunately, I have not seen a way to reverse this. The other option is that it never was an official hard drive and was placed in the official casing. It will be limited to the 16GBs of an unofficial drive with the cable.delete the porn from the 60gb hard drive and dumbledore will give a scroll with a mathematic expression that says "yes".

you're welcome
SOmetimes when you get a new drive it changes and it possibly could mess up

it has to many gb becuase it started off so low maybe you should wait a while dude.