Cant Format External Hard drive

[liambalfour]

I had filled a hard drive for my bro a few months ago, he uses it with a WD media player and a PS3, he said it had stopped working, i put in in the laptop via usb and it says it needs formatted but I cant do it.

In Disk Manager it shows as RAW rather than NTFS and it wont let me format it. Any ideas or programs i can use to get it up and running, i dont care about the data as it is backed up else where

 

[Him Her]

If you're not worried about the data, remove the partition in Disk Manager, add a new one and format

 

[liambalfour]

i tried that and it gives an error message "the format did not complete succesfully". i tried formatting it to fat 32 and NTFS but none work

 

[Him Her]

Try another computer, same result, looks like a sh*gged drive

 

[liambalfour]

tried another laptop, no joy. Got bit more info he had a powercut while watching a film via ps3 he went to finish the film when the power was back but it was showing as being empty.

Cheersfor the help so far Him Her

 

[Him Her]

Only other thing I can suggest before you bin it is booting the computer from Hirens or Linux CD - the tools are more aggressive

 

[liambalfour]

Got a program called EaseUS Rata recovery wizard, it isable to find the films and move them to my desktop but cant find an option to format it, currently looking for lost partitions which may help. Doesnt seem live the drive is ruined just need a program that can format it

 

[mike361]

you tried doing it through CMD?

 

[liambalfour]

no,what whould i type to do this, the drive is E:

 

[mike361]

Hi Mate,

No point my typing this so follow this link: hxxp://www.techhack.co.uk/2011/03/31/format-a-hard-drive-with-command-prompt/

 

[liambalfour]

tried to do it in dos it failed once but it let me "clean" and once i went to disk manager it gave me a pop up, tried the boot option that failed, next i tried the other option which it said not all other windows can read it. It is now formatted in NTFS and ready to go . . . and then it hit me he uses it on the PS3 not i need to find out how to change it to FAT32

 

[Him Her]

Delete the partition and reformat...

 

[liambalfour]

its a 750gb hard drive, it only gives ntfs or exFat, can a ps3 read an exFat hard drive

 

[Him Her]

its a 750gb hard drive, it only gives ntfs or exFat, can a ps3 read an exFat hard drive

I think not...

I'm assuming you're using the software that came with it? Note the drive letter and from a command prompt in Windows:

format /fs:fat32 [d:]

Should sort it.

Or select ntfs in your software and use a converter like this one:

NTFS to FAT32 Wizard - CNET Download.com

 

[Shindig]

You could grab a live copy of GParted. Boot to that and format.

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