Low Level Format Tool

[psychoadept]

Holy moly. This morning I came into possession of a 2TB HDD that was physically fine but logically BORKED. It showed up in File Explorer but threw all kinds of errors, wouldn't format, and locked up any software that tried to scan it. Chkdsk just threw up its hands and said "I can't do anything with a RAW drive." On my laptop, trying to format it crashed explorer.exe completely and disabled my Bluetooth until I restarted the computer (extra annoying since I have a BT mouse and just broke my touchpad, lol).

But I'm nothing if not stubborn and I hated to give up on this little drive. Trying to format it using PowerShell got me enough info to get me here, and that got me to this: http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

Which, miraculously, seems to be working. After the first 1%, it's already gotten rid of whatever the issue is that was causing things to lock up. Disk Management could see it again, and reported the correct capacity rather than 0 everything.  It'll probably be tomorrow night before I know if anything will actually come of it, but I was impressed enough by that much to throw them the $3 for a license (which is not required, just speeds things up a little - for me it's been an extra 10-30 MB/s).

[sveakul]

It's my impression that "low-level formatting" is the equivalent of writing zeros to every sector on the drive--does that jibe with yours?  The free WD "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows" tool will do the latter.  I have it installed on a Seagate, although I have WD data drives.  It performs SMART diagnostics on the Seagate too so my guess is it may do the "Write Zeros" operation to any model drive as well (?).  If the hddguru app doesn't finish up you may want to try it: https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en&p=3 .  Good luck in any case!

[psychoadept]

Yeah, I don't think this is really "low level" in the sense of doing something like with firmware. It does about the same thing any formatting program does. It was the first app I found that didn't just choke on the drive, though. But I think the drive is a goner, anyway.

[phred]

It does acid the same thing any formatting program does.

The drive is probably a goner due to all the acid it took when it was younger.

[psychoadept]

Har har.

But seriously, I'd tried several 3rd party apps, along with various Windows/command line/power shell commands. Nothing else had even gotten that far. At one point the computer was actually recognizing it as a proper drive, just without a file system, but then it went downhill and eventually stopped responding at all.

[phred]

I would think at this point even if you got it working to the point of being able to read and write, I wouldn't trust it.

You can buy a 2TB USB Passport drive for about $50 from Amazon. I have four of them and use three as external drives for backups on three desktop PCs. The fourth is also used for backup storage on two laptops.

[psychoadept]

Yeah, I don't even really need more storage right now, I'd just like to get some stuff off the NAS temporarily so I can fiddle with it. I think I'm giving up for now, it's not really worth putting money into. It's just my thriftiness and my compulsive need to Make Things Work that led me down this rabbit hole.