[SOLVED] Seagate 8TB harddrive won't format / won't convert from RAW to NTFS: WINDOWS

[okwiBoy]

Hey Everyone,

I bought an 8TB Seagate hard drive from Amazon (BarraCuda Hard Drive 8TB ST8000DM004) and I have plugged it in correctly and it shows up in my disk management as 8tb RAW Healthy (Primary Partition) after a few days of trying and failing. I have read that windows doesn't understand RAW and I need to convert it from RAW to NTSF or exFAT. Every method I have tried (following YouTube tutorials using cmd and diskpart, using 3rd party software) and all have failed to format the disk, or at least failed to convert it to something windows can read and use.

Any more suggestions or advice on how to proceed is appreciated!

I have also had an issue where sometimes after failing to format the hard drive disappears from the system and I must perform a full shutdown and restart.

I don't know what the issue is maybe some sort of copyright protection from Seagate? I read in somewhere they are just ripping out these hard drives from external hard drives and just sending them out. I didn't come with any packaging or wires just the hard drive... and it is having issue.

tldr: Disk Management / diskpart / 3rd party software All can't format 8tb RAW hard drive. Any help?

 

[MadsModsat]

A drive of that size needs to be partitioned as GPT, and then formatted (NTFS is most commonly used for Windows) -if you want to use one partiton for the total drive capcity.

With all the methods you've tried so far, did they all inform you to use a GPT type partition, or did you only try using MBR so far, perhaps?

Windows Disk Manager lets you switch between MBR and GPT type partitions, before formatting. It can be done using Diskpart as well

You should be able to format the full disk by deleting any existing partition, and then creating a GPT-type partition and formatting it as NTFS (or exFAT if you prefer that).

If you are already trying to format a GPT-type partition, I don't have any other suggestions. But I just thought I'd ask, since you didn't go into a lot of details with regards to the specific settings of the partition you are trying to format.

EDIT: Link added.

 

[fzabkar]

Seagate has DiscWizard which is an OEM version of Acronis True Image. It should be able to format your drive.

https://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/discwizard/

Seagate's enclosures are usually configured with a sector size of 4096 bytes. This can confuse other formatting tools.