1TB My Passport drive cannot be formatted

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi All:

I have a 1TB My Passport drive that used to work just fine until a few days ago (drive was purchased in December 2011).

Something happened, and the drive shows up like so:

I am unable to format it or do anything with it.  Format fails.

I have another My Passport that works fine;  I copied the WD software that comes with it, copied to my internal disk, used that to discover the corrupted My Passport, tried to format;  that also fails.

After the format fails, the activity light on the corrupted drive stays lit, and I can’t do anything else on that drive until I unplug and then plug it back in.

In my situation, I don’t care about recovering any data, so any technqiue to make that drive usable would be greatly appreciated.  Or am I hosed?

Really frustrated!  Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. 

Regards…

2

You can try do a low level format, then try to reformat it.  If still fails you may contact WD for a replacement.

How to low level format:  http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1211/session/L3RpbWUvMTMyODk3MTM4Ny9zaWQvSmJSdl9xUWs%3D

3

The drive is showing as Raw sometimes this trick will work http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214579 Just run command prompt as an administrator. I know it’s meant to convert from FAT32 to NTFS but have seen this used to fix Raw partitions too. You don’t have anything to loose if you don’t care about data.

Joe