how can I reuse s USB drive that was used as backup for windows

System is Win 10 home (21H1) running on Toshiba laptop.
External HD is a Simpletech USB drive with 177Gb on it.

I have upgraded to a 2TB SSD drive (again, USB) to keep backups on - both for convenience and the added room.

The PROBLEM:

I would like to put the old Simpletech drive to some kind of use, or maybe donate to someone else, but I can do neither until I figure out how to get the old backup data OFF!

Deleting doesn't work.
Trying to remove "read only" attributes doesn't work.
Even trying to reformat it didn't work.
I keep getting "write protected" errors.
I even walked through the tutorial about how to remove write protect from a drive (not the Regedit one) - no change.

I have found that I can create and delete things on the little bit of remaining space on the drive, so the drive itself is OK. It's just that the majority of it is set aside for the backup files and I can't do a thing about them,

I'm certainly no pro, and I'm definitely stuck. There's probably a simple answer but I sure don't know what it is.
Anyone have the time to lend a hand?

Thanks In advance.
Steve

SteveBill said:

System is Win 10 home (21H1) running on Toshiba laptop.
External HD is a Simpletech USB drive with 177Gb on it.

I have upgraded to a 2TB SSD drive (again, USB) to keep backups on - both for convenience and the added room.

The PROBLEM:

I would like to put the old Simpletech drive to some kind of use, or maybe donate to someone else, but I can do neither until I figure out how to get the old backup data OFF!

Deleting doesn't work.
Trying to remove "read only" attributes doesn't work.
Even trying to reformat it didn't work.
I keep getting "write protected" errors.
I even walked through the tutorial about how to remove write protect from a drive (not the Regedit one) - no change.

I have found that I can create and delete things on the little bit of remaining space on the drive, so the drive itself is OK. It's just that the majority of it is set aside for the backup files and I can't do a thing about them,

I'm certainly no pro, and I'm definitely stuck. There's probably a simple answer but I sure don't know what it is.
Anyone have the time to lend a hand?

Thanks In advance.
Steve

have you tried diskpart
list disk
select disk xxxx
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
exit.


Cheers
jimbo

Oh-k-a-a-a-y. That SEEMED to work. At least it reported that everything went well.

The only problem now is that my computer says the drive doesn't exist at all.

I tried unplugging it and reinserting it. I hear the little tone that says it's been inserted, but it never shows up in file explorer.
I tried closing and restarting that too.
No soap.

I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth the hassle, but I can be stubborn when hardware refused to cooperate.

So now what? Time to break out the hammer?

Again, maybe it's just me...
Steve


P.S. I just looked in the control panel and it shows a "USB mass storage device" with unknown mfr, etc. It also says it's unavailable.
(while I'm screwing with this, I've unplugged the 2TB drive. No need to mess that up too.)

Go into "disk management" you should get a message to "initialize drive" do so, and it should format the drive, you should then be able to use the drive as normal

Disk management didn't give me any option to initialize, but I did find a way to assign a letter to the drive. PRESTO!

It looks like everything is all good. Many thanks to both y'all

jimbo45 said:

have you tried diskpart
list disk
select disk xxxx
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
exit.


Cheers
jimbo

There was one command missing here. It should have been:

Code:

list disk
select disk xxxx
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
assign
exit
exit

The assign command was missing.

OK - thanks for the update.

Now, my 2TB SSD is acting squirrely. I guess I'll try the same thing on it.
(if you're interested, I can create folders, but not delete them, and I can't copy anything into them. Error 0x80070570)
I'm not asking for help - yet. If it comes to that, I'll start a new thread.
Thanks again for all your help.