HELP! External Hard Drive Format

Question

Good day everyone. I'm having difficulties with formatting my external hard drive. For the past 2-3 days, I've been trying to format it. It started acting up after sending 2 files of about 5gb each, I transferred these files at night, then the following day, it doesn't show up on the pc. When I plug it in with a usb cable, I can hear the little sound that it is connected and I have the safe eject option on the taskbar, but it does not show in explorer. I watched videos, searched for solutions to nothing. At the disk management, diskpart and partition tools, I can see a negative capacity. I tried all diskpart and cmd commmands, I keep getting error after error. Anyone who can help me out please.

Answer 1

Hi Brandon,

if you try to initialize the drive to MBR does that error out also?

If it does, then you should take that drive to the PC Repair Shop, to see if they can get it working, the only time I have seen that error is fi a drive is totally full and there is no room for Windows to manipulate the bits on the drive.

Answer 2

I get this when opening the disk management. I clicked on cancel at first, it shows again when trying to initialize it

Answer 3

Hi Brandon,

Okay, the clean operation seems to have succeeded the second time, do that again and do not try to create a partition on that drive or convert it to GPT or MBR in Command Prompt, then open Disk Management, and please post a screenshot of that drive in the bottom pane of Disk Management

Answer 4

I get all sorts of errors. Error after the other. Especially when I have to use the clean command, they start coming up. If I do it 2 times, it works. When I have to run the create partition primary error, or with size, more errors come up. I even came across one telling me it should be MBR something, and I converted it to MBR with AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Answer 5

Hi Brandon,

I am Dave, an Independent Advisor, I will help you with this.

I understand you have tried all the commands, but please run these commands and let me know which one fails and what is the exact error produced:

Run this command and hit Enter:

diskpart

Run this command and hit Enter:

list disk

(Make note of the disk number you want to convert and enter it into the next command - replace X)

Run this command and hit Enter:

select disk X

Run this command and hit Enter:

clean

Run this command and hit Enter:

convert mbr

Then close Command Prompt