I have a bunch of these bare drives (Seagate ST 4000DM000) that I'm told came from a Linux raid set-up. I want to use them as back up external NTFS drives in WIndows 10 Home. Windows' Disk Management can't even see them and I don't care about the data in them. All I want is to simply make them usable in WIndows 10. How do I format these to NTFS formatted drives? Please advise. Thank you.
Welcome to the forum follow this video and use diskpart XBnPC - How to Clean-Delete-Remove Raid More!! - YouTube
Thank you! I checked out the video. But the example is for a 400 GB drive. I have 4 TB drives. Should I use MBR or GPT... does it make a difference... I'm guessing I should select GPT instead. Yes?
Addendum ( a few minutes later)....
I'm doing this on an Asus i7 laptop with a 1 TB internal drive and the external hard disk is in a Kingwin brand EZ-Dock attached to the laptop.
I went ahead and used "diskpart" in the command prompt and used the 'clean' command, went back to Disk Management and formatted the 4 TB disk using GPT. The end result? 1,678 GB only. What happened to the other 2 TB? Please advise.
Last edited by bofhlusr; 01 Nov 2018 at 20:24. Reason: Addendum
It was part of a raid setup in Linux. I believe it was formatted using EXT2.
It's unformatted. I formatted it in WIndows 10 but it only shows up as 1687 GB. I'm already familiar with and used diskpart and Disk Management. It's supposed to be a 4 TB Seagate drives (Model: ST4000DM000, the serial number in one of them is W300F7NI. I bought them for $30 each).
.... a few minutes later.... some thoughts:
1. I wonder if the problem might be in the docking unit?
2. Might it work if placed internally in a desktop PC (not like where it is now as an external USB drive)?
3. Low level format? I don't think I've done this before...
4. What if these are used in a Linux based OS? (but I gave up on Linux years ago)
Anyone have other ideas?
Last edited by bofhlusr; 02 Nov 2018 at 02:10.
First you should run some diagnostic on the drives, seagate has his own tool "SeaTools", to ensure drives are in good condition.
http://knowledge.seagate.com/article...wwlocale=it-it
Hi there
@roy111
no need for all that diagnostic stuff - simply just format
@bofhlusr
For HDD's > around 2TB you have to make them GPT. Follow commands
Get into command mode (admin) then do the following commands
1) Diskpart
2) List Disk
3) Select Disk xx (xx will be the number of the 4TB disk)
4)Clean
5)Convert GPT
6)Create partition Primary
7)exit
Now Windows can format the HDD in the normal way -- you can do it after step 6) but for people not familiar with the CLI it's probably easier to exit back to windows and format in windows
however if you want to use cli -- then instead of 7) exit continue :
7) list partition
8) select partition xx -- you need the big one not the small efi one created when the convert GPT command issued
9)format quick fs=ntfs
10)assign
11)exit
Cheers
jimbo
Run these commands from admin command prompt :-
Code:diskpart list disk select disk # (# = number of 4 TB drive from list) clean (be sure you have selected right drive as everything gets wiped) convert gpt create partition primary select partition 1 format fs=ntfs quick assign exit
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