I haven’t posted here in a while. Truth be told, I forgot I had joined and sought out help. Sorry!
Well, I’ve posted my problem in several other forums with not much help. I’m getting a bit frustrated and ready to just throw my drive out the window.
I’ve been trying to fix my external hard drive. It’s a My Book Premium Edition. Originally, it had files on it…but all were deleted (except a few password protected files.) I didn’t know the password, so someone suggested to try reformatting the drive anyway. The reformatting didn’t finish and had errors; then, I couldn’t even save files to the drive. Next, I was told to delete the volume, unplug, replug and format the drive. So I did. HOWEVER when I plugged my drive back in, my computer wouldn’t recognize it…so I can’t format it.
Interestingly enough, I decided to plug it into my sister’s computer. (Her computer has Windows 7; I have Windows Vista.) Her computer recognizes the drive, but as QuickData Y: and Quickbooks X:
What should I do? I don’t understand what is going on with it. Should I just hard wipe it? (Although, I don’t think I can if my computer won’t read the drive…)
Well for some strange reason, the other day, Disk Management recognized the external hard drive (but not My Computer.) It recognized the drive as unallocated. I assigned a letter for the drive and began formatting the drive NTFS (normal way, not quick way.) After several hours, it was almost complete…but then, my stupid computer did Windows Update. :( So…I had to start over again. This time, Disk Management recognized the drive as Disk 1 (healthy partition, blah blah) and RAW.
I started formatting for the second time (NTFS again) and waited over 12 hours for it to complete. Towards the end, a message popped up and said that formatting couldn’t be completed.
By now, I was beginning to get pissed. I clicked on the drive again, tried to do a quick format (NTFS again), but it said the same error. Then, I deleted the volume, unplugged it, waited, reconnected the drive, and waited for my computer to recognize the drive. It recognized the drive as unallocated.
I assigned the drive a letter for the drive, and tried another quick format (NTFS.) Still, I couldn’t format the drive. Same error. My last idea was to try formatting the drive as exFAT (that was my only other option.) Didn’t work.
Any ideas?
The only other thing I can think to do is to hard wipe it with DBAN. I’m not sure if it would actually help. Would I just be wasting my time?
Sometimes the command prompt to convert a FAT32 partition to NTFS works http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214579 since you formatted it you don’t have anything to loose.
