External HDD Reformat

You'd think it's as easy as going to Windows Explorer, right click on the drive letter, and selecting Format. Well, not on this portable hard disk.

If you check my previous post, I've managed to salvage most of the data from it, but it refuses to be formatted. Windows' built-in Disk Management reports the drive as RAW. Windows format takes too long, and it eventually gives up. Definitely something wrong with the HDD.

This is what I did to fix it. First, download and install TestDisk. It tells me both the main and backup boot sectors are bad. Use TestDisk to rebuild the boot sectors. Then, use the built-in DiskPart clean the disk and create a primary partition:

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt

  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---

  Disk 0    Online          149 GB      0 B

  Disk 1    Online          465 GB      0 B

 

DISKPART> select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

 

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

 

DISKPART> create partition primary

DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.

 

Download and install low-level format tool from HDDGuru. Took its sweet time formatting the 500GB HDD at an average of 24MB/s. After that, do a quick format using WD's Quick Formatter.