New datastore Greyed out

[Shanmukh2]

Trying to build a home Lab. Installed ESXi 7 on a USB connected to Dell latitude 5501.
Connected a 1TB SSD ( WD My Passport) locally. Trying to use this as a disk space for creating/storing VMs.

However "New datastore", it is greyed out.

Please let me know how to use the hard drive.

[a_p_]

According to the screenshots the drive already contains a partition which occupies the full disk space.
You will have to destroy/delete the existing partition in order to create a new one (a datastore).

André

[Shanmukh2 · Accepted solution]

Thank you.

found the following.

https://burnhamforensics.com/2019/01/31/manually-attach-usb-device-as-a-vmfs-datastore-in-esxi/

Since the disk was already partitioned, issued the following command

vmkfstools -C vmfs6 -S External-Storage /dev/disks/<deviceID>:1

 This formatted the partition to vmfs6 and was able to create a datastore named External-Storage.