external hard drive formatting issues

[Andrew_235]

I have an external drive that used to be my main drive on my laptop, but was replaced with an ssd. bout a 2.5 in enclosure and tried to format the disk, but disk managment will not let me format it. when i got the ssd, i used the samsung data migration program to change drives, so the hard drive has windows efi partition, and two recovery partitions on it that i can not format or remove. how can i format this hard drive?

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Happy New Year & Welcome to the community, @Andrew_235!

I'd strongly recommend you check how your laptop boots without the old main HDD in the enclosure connected to it. I suspect that the system might still think that this HDD is your booting drive which is most probably why you are unable to format it. I'd advise you to check your boot priorities in BIOS and also post a screenshot (e.g. via Imgur) of your Disk Management in Windows with the external HDD connected.

Once you have determined that the laptop boots properly with the SSD and without the external drive connected, you could also try to reformat it through another Windows computer around you. Just plug it there and reformat it through Disk Management.

P.S. Make sure you back up all important data from it somewhere else first to avoid any potential data loss.

Keep me posted with the troubleshooting & details!
SuperSoph_WD