I've scavenged an EHD from my Dish Network Hopper receiver. It shows in Disk Management but not in Windows File Explorer.
How do I reformat the entire HDD to render it useful on my Win 10 computer?
There are several ways to do so.
Since you know that you can see the drive in Disk Management, you can simply right click the drive and choose to format it.
NOTE: If no valid partitions are seen, you may need to create a partition first, then format it.
In addition, you could do it within the DISKPART utility. Below is a sample. Note that I am doing this with a thumb drive for this sample. I start by wiping getting a list of available drives, selecting the thumb drive, wiping the contents, then creating a partition and formatting it.
A few additional notes:
You will see that the first time I run the "clean" command an error is displayed. This is a common occurrence. If you encounter that, simply run the command again just as I did.
Also, when I run the "assign" command note that I am specifying the drive letter to "F" to the drive. If you run just the command "assign" with no other parameters, it will automatically assign the next available drive letter.
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 476 GB 2048 KB *
Disk 1 Online 230 GB 0 B
DISKPART> select disk 1
Disk 1 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> clean
DiskPart has encountered an error: A device which does not exist was specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.
DISKPART> clean
DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.
DISKPART> create partition primary
DiskPart succeeded in creating the specified partition.
DISKPART> format fs=ntfs quick label="My Flash Drive"
100 percent completed
DiskPart successfully formatted the volume.
DISKPART> assign letter=F
DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.
DISKPART> Exit
Thanks. I got to step "DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk". but now am needing help assigning a drive letter or name. See screen copy Below:
Windows PowerShell
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Warning: PowerShell detected that you might be using a screen reader and has disabled PSReadLine for compatibility purposes. If you want to re-enable it, run 'Import-Module PSReadLine'.
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> diskpart
Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.19041.964
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: ACER_DESKTOP
DISKPART> select disk 7
Disk 7 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> clean
DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.
DISKPART> format fs=ntfs quick label="My Flash Drive"
There is no volume selected.
Please select a volume and try again.
DISKPART> format fs=ntfs quick label="My Flash Drive"
There is no volume selected.
Please select a volume and try again.
DISKPART>
Thanks for your help!
You skipped a step. After cleaning the drive, a partition needs to be created. Only after you create the partition can you format it.
Let me explain further....
When you run the command "clean" you are effectively removing all the information about the configuration of the drive and starting with a clean slate.
On that drive, you can now create multiple different "partitions". This allows you to break up the drive into multiple pieces. So for example, on a single physical drive you might have drive D:, E:, and F:. This let's you organize that single physical drive into separate parts, kind of like having a file cabinet with several draws, each of which can hold different information.
The way I did it in my example with the command "create partition primary" simply creates a single partition that occupies the entire drive.
Then, the "format" command actually prepares the partition to store data in a manner that Windows can understand.
Hope that helps! Feel free to ask more questions if clarification is needed.
Thanks so much for your expert help. I did as suggested and now have a useable disk!
Cool! Glad to hear it.
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