Trying to format unrecognisable USB drive

[buddee]

I have a laptop hard drive that was removed from an old laptop and now used as an external USB drive. I went to use it as a recovery USB for my son's laptop not realising that it was going to wipe the whole drive. When I realised after pushing 'go' I immediately pushed cancel. However, it has now rendered the USB drive useless and it will not recognise it. I can see it when I use DISKPART but when I use the CLEAN command I get the error message

Virtual Disk Service error: Clean is not allowed on the disk containing the current boot,
system, pagefile, crashdump or hibernation volume.

This is obviously due to the fact that it was the main hard drive on my laptop and I have never formatted it. Is there a way around this?

Sorry if this has already been solved but each thread had a slightly different scenario which didn't fix my problem

Thanks,

Rosemary

 

[iXeon]

Well giving the fact that you used the drive as the os drive disk part wont help but theres a way to do so and that is using bootable partitioning softwares.
And try to make the main windows disk/partition active and then see if the disk part still recognize the external disk as a pagefile disk.

 

[buddee]

Thanks iXeon. I have a little bit of knowledge about computers but not enough to know what you are talking about

 

[iXeon]

Alright I'll make it simple
1-go to start - cmd - diskpart
2-type list disk
3-from the list select the hdd that windows is installed in like : select disk 0
4-type list volume
5-select the operatin system drive like drive C :type select volume 1
6-type active
And then try to do the same thing you were trying before i mean the clear command

 

[buddee]

Alright I'll make it simple
1-go to start - cmd - diskpart
2-type list disk
3-from the list select the hdd that windows is installed in like : select disk 0
4-type list volume
5-select the operatin system drive like drive C :type select volume 1
6-type active
And then try to do the same thing you were trying before i mean the clear command

Thank you. It gives me the message 'the selected disk is not a fixed mbr disk'

 

[iXeon]

In which step?

 

[buddee]

In which step?

When I enter ACTIVE

 

[iXeon]

Well in the step 5 select system recovery partition and then active

 

[buddee]

Well in the step 5 select system recovery partition and then active

I get the same response