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Disk Formatting or Drive Not recognized

Anonymous
2023-03-02T13:47:26+00:00

Having an issue with a new HDD that I installed. It's giving me an error message below when I try to initialize.

The disk is showing in the device manager and also in the storage space hardware under control panel. The bios is good and looks like the drive in enabled there too. Any suggestions on how to get this disk to format or initialize?

"The operation failed to complete because the disk management console view is not up to date...." I have restarted the computer, restarted disk management and still not working.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Devices and drivers

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  1. Virginia M 40,820 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2023-03-02T14:47:12+00:00

    The latest build of Windows 10 is 22H2. Have you been offered this?

    Do you receive the error when you try to initialise the disk?

    Disk 0 is usually the Windows drive, if the new drive is showing as 0 then is it possible there’s Windows OS files on there? I doubt it if it’s new though.

    What does diskpart show?

    Right click start>powershell with admin & enter:

    Diskpart

    List disk

    Can you supply a screenshot of this?

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-03-02T14:26:53+00:00

    That's an odd issue. This could get a bit advanced. There's a few ways you can go and that it could be. One is the drive itself, two is Windows disk tools just can't deal with a bunch of things (and much of that are normal things it can't deal with), three is your Windows installation could be messed up, four is the storage drivers or maybe BIOS even.

    Personally, I feel the single best thing is to make a bootable USB stick of gparted https://gparted.org/download.php and boot that and see if it can format the drive (may require more than one attempt). As long as the drive isn't trashed (or its connection eg cables, enclosure, or whatever), it will be able to format it. Its the single best drive tool I've ever seen. Format it something else in there then format it to NTFS or whatever, etc. If it works through it then you can most likely get it working in Windows.

    However, you could try looking into the other things like trying an in-place upgrade of Windows to sort out any possible problems. Sfc, dism, chkdsk, etc will not be the best way to go though you could try them. If anything chkdsk and in-place upgrade or clean install of Windows. You may want to make backups first just in case.

    The storage drivers really should be highly unlikely and the BIOS a bit more likely. But, some people have really messed up storage hardware with silly drivers. The drive having a physical problem for most people should be far far more likely.

    Should be about it. I don't feel the issue is to be solved in Device Manager or one of the other disk tools they'll probably point you to, though you can hope it can be, but I'm not expecting it here. If it doesn't work they'll probably say the drive is trashed as that's all Windows only folk know :)

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-03-02T14:39:23+00:00

    Thanks for the response.

    Version is 21H2, drive was purchased from Amazon and it's a 4TB drive.

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  4. Virginia M 40,820 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2023-03-02T14:28:01+00:00

    Does the drive have a letter assigned?

    Check to see if automount is enabled:

    Right click Start>Powershell with admin & enter:

    Diskpart

    Automount

    If automount is shown as disabled then enter;

    Automount enable

    Then restart the pc.

    Also ensure the drive’s device drivers are up to date under device manager, you can also uninstall the driver, restart the PC then choose scan for changes.

    Also if the drive is external then try another USB port, if the same then go to device manager & try uninstalling the USB drivers, then plug the drive in to reinstall the driver.

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  5. Virginia M 40,820 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2023-03-02T14:20:23+00:00

    Hello, I’m Virginia, a fellow user like yourself.

    Sorry to hear you’re experiencing problems. May I ask which Windows 10 build are you running - 20H2, 21H1, 21H2 or 22H2?

    Can you supply a screenshot of drive management?

    From where did you purchase the drive?

    What capacity is the drive?

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