When I plug my external into my pc it tells me it's unable to use and to format the drive. So I try to do so, and Windows tells me that there's a program using the external drive.
I attempt to format anyway since I know there's no programs using the drive, and after a minute the formatting comes to a stop and I get a message saying it's unable to format.
I've tried formatting it via 'This PC' and DIsk Management in Windows 10. Tried Quick Format as well and nothing is progressing.
Help is much appreciated.
Try rebooting and immediately after it get's to your desktop, format it.
If Disk Management shows the drive as RAW, that often means that the drive has suffered hardware failures -- and it might not be recoverable.
You could try downloading and installing the Minitool Partition Wizard tool and seeing if it will reformat the drive -- but if the drive is having hardware failures, that's not going to work, either.
Tried this and still get the same thing. "Windows was unable to complete the format."Try rebooting and immediately after it get's to your desktop, format it.It does display as RAW in Disk Management. If this is the only solution I'll try it I guess. This problem didn't start occurring until I did something to the drive in Disk Management months ago. I only now developed the urge to finally solve this issue.If Disk Management shows the drive as RAW, that often means that the drive has suffered hardware failures -- and it might not be recoverable.
You could try downloading and installing the Minitool Partition Wizard tool and seeing if it will reformat the drive -- but if the drive is having hardware failures, that's not going to work, either.
You can recovery data from a drive indicated as RAW (in some cases), you just have to use data recovery apps as Windows won't read it.
The best app I've used recently is Active@File Recovery Pro. It's free to download and try out, but you have to buy a license for any serious usage of it -- but it's not expensive. When you run it in deepest discovery mode, it's likely to take all night to run -- as it did when I last used it, but it's worth it if it finds and recovers what you want to save.
This can also happen when someone disconnects a drive without using the "Safely remove" icon. I can corrupt the beginning of the disk ruining the SVI(system volume information) causing windows to see the disk as RAW(meaning unreadable system partitioning). It's as as if you plugged in an ext.3 or ext. 4 partitioned disk from Linux.
you could try typing ina command prompt:
chkdsk x: /f /r –where you replace X as the drive letter
Launched Cmd as Admin. Put your command in and got this:This can also happen when someone disconnects a drive without using the "Safely remove" icon. I can corrupt the beginning of the disk ruining the SVI(system volume information) causing windows to see the disk as RAW(meaning unreadable system partitioning). It's as as if you plugged in an ext.3 or ext. 4 partitioned disk from Linux.
you could try typing ina command prompt:
chkdsk x: /f /r –where you replace X as the drive letter
The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.
Oh, hmmm, try:Launched Cmd as Admin. Put your command in and got this:
The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.
Right click on Cmd, to RunAs Administrator
Then type DiskPart
Then type List Disk - will get a table of disks each with a Disk #.
Then choose Select Disk n (whatever the disk # is) This disk now has the focus
Then type Clean All.
That will remove all partitons, formatting, data, and write zeros to all sectors.
That should give you a "new" drive that will have to be Initialized, Partitioned, & Formatted.
Did this and got the following result:
DiskPart has encountered an error: The drive cannot find the sector requested. See th System Event Log for more information.
Also, the drive in Disk Management now doesn't show as RAW. It just shows as Unallocated. Can't see it no more in This PC.
