Select the USB drive and click 'Format' button to format the flash drive. Note: Repairing bad sectors damages files stored on and near bad sectors, thus if files on the drive are important to you, you need to backup or recover data first. I have an LG external hard drive which I unplugged one day without doing the safe eject. Now it won't work. The computer recognize its existence on the F drive and disk management says the status is healthy (primary partition) But it will not format. Under File system, the drive is described as RAW. Jan 17, 2019  Right-click the new hard drive and select the Format option. In the 'Value label' field, type a descriptive name for the drive. Use the 'File system' drop-down menu, and select NTFS (recommended.

1. Windows 7 Can't Format Hard Drive
2. Windows Xp Can't Format Hard Drive
3. Windows Can't Find Hard Drive
4. Windows Can't Format New Hard Drive
5. Windows Can't Format Drive
6. Windows Can't Format Hard Drive

How-To Geek Forums / Windows 7

(Solved) - External hard drive won't format HELP

I have an LG external hard drive which I unplugged one day without doing the safe eject. Now it won't work. The computer recognize its existence on the F drive and disk management says the status is healthy (primary partition) But it will not format. Under File system, the drive is described as RAW. I do not need to recover the data but I got it only six months ago and hate to have to throw it away and buy a new one. Any help would be much appreciated.

Try this, with the drive attached;

From command prompt type: Convert f: /FS:NTFS

Mike

Thanks Mike but the formatting was unsuccessful because it is a RAW volume. I tried doing the formatting from Disk Management but that did not work either. Any thoughts on what else can be done? The status is still marked as healthy

Go to Disk Management and delete partition and volume until you have unallocated space. Then start anew by defining a new simple partition.

take the drive out of the enclosure. get a new enclosure or a USB 'bridge' that reads sATA and try above stuff again. and get a fresh USB cord

Thanks WHS. I did that and now, six hours later it says 8% is formatted. Does this sound right to you?

Hi 202D - thanks for the suggestion but I am a bit of a novice. What is an enclosure and how do I take the drive out? Is there a link you know that explains these things?

Did you make the new partition NTFS.

@202d, Why would you suggest the Op get a new enclosure? The drive was working. All new USB drives are SATA drives. The original older ones that you purchased just an enclosure you could put an IDE drive in it.

8% in 6 hours does not sound right. Do the following>

Go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt. Right click on Command Prompt and 'Run as Administrator'. Into the black window type:

chkdsk /f

Then press Enter. That will run for a while and fix any bad sectors. When that is done, run these commands in the same window - each followed by Enter

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk n (where n is the number that was given in List Disk for your disk in question)
Format /fs:NTFS Quick

When that is done, continue in the same window

Select disk n (same as above)
Create partition primary

And still in the same window

List volume
Select volume n (n is probably 0)
Assign letter=M (or any other higher letter )
Exit

Now you should have a volume with one partition M that should show in Computer.

Hi WHS. I got as far as
DISKPART> SELECT DISK 1
DISK 1 IS NOW THE SELECTED DISK.

I pressed RETURN.
DISKPART> (THEN I TYPED) /fs:NTFS Quick

I pressed return and I got this message:
The arguments specified for this command are not valid. For more information on the command tupe: HELP FORMAT

I typed HELP and was told (among a lot of other technical terms) that a volume must be selected for this operation to succeed.

So what should I do now?

When you typed
diskpart
list disk
There should have been a volume assigned to the disk you want to format.
re read the last paragraph that whs posted above.

EDIT: you may need to type
detail volume
to get the volume information

Try a LIST VOLUME followed by a SELECT VOLUME (the right one from the list). Then do the FORMAT.

@WHS @Germ-X. Thanks people but no luck. The list volume worked.

The info is:
Volume 5, (LTR) F, no info under Label, (Fs) RAW, (Type) Partition, (Size) 298GB, (Status) Healthy.

Then DISKPART came up and I did the following:

DISKPART> Select Volume 5

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Volume 5 is the slected volume

DISKPART> Format /fs:NTFS Quick

The arguments specified for this command for not valid.
for more info type HELP FORMAT

DISKPART> HELP FORMAT
blah blah..A volume must be selected for this operation to succeed
Examples:
FORMAT FS=NTFS LABEL='NEW vOLUME' QUICK COMPRESS
FORMAT RECOMMENDED OVERRIDE

This is where I am up to so far and I did do the chkdsk so I presume the hardware on the external hard drive is OK. Help is much appreciated.

DiskPart <ENTER>

list disk <ENTER>

select disk X <ENTER> X=Disk Number

clean all <ENTER> Will take time

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list disk <ENTER>

select disk X <ENTER> X=Disk Number

create partition primary <ENTER>

format fs=ntfs quick <ENTER> NO slash

active <ENTER>

Windows 7 Can't Format Hard Drive

exit <ENTER>

exit <ENTER>

Reboot and check Letter assigned in Windows Disk Management

@Raphoenix. Thanks I will give it a try tonight when I go home and let you all know how it goes. I am sure there are many people who have unplugged their USB by mistake.

Hi. The latest in the saga:

Diskpart> Select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

Diskpart> Clean all

DiskPart has encountered an error. The remote procedure call failed.
See the System Event Log for more information.

I WENT TO THE SYSTEM EVENT LOG AND IT HAS THESE ENTRIES:

ERROR: The Virtual Disk service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service. <SERVICE CONTROL MANAGER>

INFORMATION: The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the running state. <SERVICE CONTROL MANAGER>

INFORMATION: SerVIce started.<VIRTUAL DISK SERVICE>

INFORMATION: The Virtual Disk service entered the running state. <SERVICE CONTROL MANAGER>

INFORMATION: The Multimedia Class Scheduler service entered the stopped state. <SERVICE CONTROL MANAGER>

If you are willing download this free partition utility > burn to Cd > change your boot order > then boot your system and look at your drive.
You will be able to see if it is partitioned correctly then make any corrections as needed. You can also format from PW
http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html
Scroll down about mid page and download the free bootable version

Just a thought. Have you tried to 'Initialize' the drive in disc management. I remember having to do something of the sort on my external.
Raph and WHS can probably tell you a little more then I can.

@rdunseith, If you have time take a look at PW you can do everything and more then disk management. I think you will like it.
I use Paragon which is about the same as PW.
The reason I suggest PW over diskpart is you can boot with it and has a graphical interface which makes it a little easier for the majority of computer users to use. You can see what you are doing and also it prompts you before actually making any changes.

g-x

Thanks Germ,
I usually just use Windows repair disk that raph suggested in an earlier topic or g-parted bootable cd. I do like that PW has an option for bootable flash drive. Going to give it a go on my test system to see if I like it better.

Robert

Thank you everybody. IT WORKED .. but in a VERY STRANGE way. This is what happened.

1. I downloaded PW and clicked on create partition and then format partition (Other options were greyed out). I was told the operation was successful.
2. I went to computer management and looked at disk management. It still told me the volume was RAW. I repeated STEP 1 and rebooted but still the volume showed up as raw.
3. Then I clicked on create partition but this time I set the size at only 50GB (my drive is 300GB). Gave it a new drive letter (not F:). Formatted the partition. It worked.
4. So I got greedy and resized the partition to 298GB. PW says the operation was successful but disk management told me the volume was RAW.
5. So I repeated Step 3 with the 50GB size. It worked again.
6. Then I thought I would be smart. I created a new partititon with 225GB and gave it a new drive letter. The new partition worked but the old 50GB partition turned RAW again.
7. I started from scratch. Deleted the entire volume and began again with PW. I still put in two partitions but sized 50GB and 138GB. THAT WORKED.

I conclude there must be some bad sectors that chkdsk could not fix. That is why when I tried formatting the entire external hard drive it did not work.

CURIOUSLY:
1. On disk management, it shows I now have four partitions. The two that I had set up. And two more: One that says 78GB of free space and one that says 27GB unallocated.
2. On PW, it shows I have four partitions. Two with drive letters that I had set up. And THREEadditional partitions each labelled *: (asterisk-colon). File system is unallocated and type is logical.

I might not have all the 300GB back but I am very very happy to have more than half of it back. So thank you again everyone. I really appreciate you all taking the time to help.

Topic Closed

This topic has been closed to new replies.

Most of the issues with Windows have one good resolution – formatting the system drive and reinstalling Windows. Or then at times, we may want to simply erase all the files & folders on our Data Drives, eg. D drive, E drive, etc. For doing this, we simply right-click on the Drive in Windows File Explorer’s PC folder and select Format from the available context menu options. Or we could open Disk Management Utility and do it.

However, formatting a hard disk might not always be the smoothest of processes. Many users have reported an acknowledged receiving an error message when trying to format the hard drive:

Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any disk utilities or other programs that are using this drive, and make sure that no window is displaying the contents of the drive. Then try formatting again.

Let us consider the two scenarios:

1. You wish to format the System Drive C: It’s obvious that it won’t happen. The system drive has to be formatted using external media or internal options but not when logged on to Windows.
2. You wish to format a Data drives like D:, E:, etc.: If you get this error in this scenario, you should close all your open applications and then try to format the drive. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always help.

Windows cannot format this drive, Quit any disk utilities or other programs that are using this drive

Let us troubleshoot the issue on a case by case basis:

You wish to format the system drive C & erase all data from your system

To do this, it is best you use the Windows installation media during Setup and select the Format option when you are asked. You will usually want to do this when you plan to clean install an operating system.

You wish to format the Data drives D:, E:, etc.

The ideal procedure to format any of these drives would be to right-click on the drive, click on Format and then start the formatting procedure. But since it is not working, we will try the following steps:

1] Force Format using Disk Management

Press Win + R to open the run window. Type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter. This opens the Disk Management Tool.

Right-click on the drive you wish to format and click on the option Format. The drive won’t format straight away but will give the following error message:

The volume (name of the drive) logical drive currently in use. To force the format of this volume click Yes.

Windows Xp Can't Format Hard Drive

It will format the drive forcefully and this could be verified by checking the space on the drive.

2] Use Diskpart

If this does not work for you, you may need to make use od the Diskpart command-line tool which ships with your Windows 10/8/7 OS.

To run this tool, open an elevated command prompt and run the following command one after the other:

Here you have to replace <no> with the number of the volume that you wish to format.

This will format the drive.

The optional switches you can use with the format command are:

• FS=<FS> – Specifies the type of file system. If no file system is given, the default file system is used.
• REVISION = <X.XX> – Specifies the file system revision (if applicable).
• RECOMMENDED – If specified, use the recommended file system and revision instead of the default if a recommendation exists.
• LABEL=<“label”> – Specifies the volume label.
• UNIT=<N> – Overrides the default allocation unit size. Default settings are strongly recommended for general use.
• QUICK – Performs a quick format.
• COMPRESS – NTFS only: Files created on the new volume will be compressed by default.
• OVERRIDE – Forces the volume to dismount first if necessary. All opened handles to the volume would no longer be valid.
• NOWAIT – Forces the command to return immediately while the format process is still in progress.
• NOERR – For scripting only. When an error is encountered, DiskPart continues to process commands as if the error did not occur.

Windows Can't Find Hard Drive

Examples:

Windows Can't Format New Hard Drive

• FORMAT FS=NTFS LABEL=”New Volume” QUICK COMPRESS
• FORMAT RECOMMENDED OVERRIDE

Windows Can't Format Drive

Hope this helps.

See this post if you receive Windows cannot be installed to this disk, The selected disk is of the GPT partition style error message.

Windows Can't Format Hard Drive

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