Hard drive cannot be formatted.

[mike0615]

Hello,
I can't format my external hard drive. It's 2.5 inch SATA Toshiba .5 TB. I only used it for about three months and now I can't access the drive using windows vista and windows 7. I brought it to the Toshiba service center and the shady looking guy said there's nothing wrong with it. Btw, I can access the drive using xp but not with vista and windows 7. I've tried everything I know like going to the disk management and format it from there but once I click "format" it says, "can't finish formatting." I've also tried the diskcheck software but it was taking ages to finish. After about 16 hours, it only read 7% percent complete so I pulled it off. I've also went to the extent of buying a new casing and transferred the disk into it but to no avail. Anyone encountered the same problem as this?

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[Hawkeye22]

You can try formatting the drive using EASUS Partition Master, but it sounds like the drive is on it's way out.

http://www.easeus.com/

 

[FreeDataRecovery]

Try formating the drive from XP. Does that work?

Run Toshiba's diagnostic utility from XP. Does it see problems?

Connect another external drive to win7. Same problem?

 

[jmike0615]

Yeah I've tried it on a different machine running windows 7 and vista and I still got the same problem. I wanted to try it on xp but all of my computers are running on vista if not windows 7. I just bought a new WD drive and inserted it to the enclosure I bought previously. Problem solved. Cheers!