Disk formatting

archangel

archangel

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I have 2 drives which I have taken out of a NAS unit. I want to format to NTFS for Windows 7........ I have tried mounting them directly as second drives and through a HDD docking unit but windows fail to recognise them. Any Suggestions:thinking:
 
Not 100% sure but I think (all?) NAS units format their drives in EXT3 structure................but so far I cannot find a Windows tool that will handle such a drive to reformat to say NTFS?
 
Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management

They should be in there somewhere. You will have to format them first.
 
arad85 said:
Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management

They should be in there somewhere. You will have to format them first.
Click to expand...

Doh! I surmised the OP had tried that first....................or at least looked there first :coat:
 
You may have to delete and recreate the partitions before you can reformat.
 
I cant delete them as the system refuses to see them....
 
So you're in disk management and you can't see any drive there? Even after you right click and rescan?

You could always try diskpart and clean the drive.

NOTE PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU SELECT THE CORRECT DISK, I'M NOT GOING TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR NUKING YOUR DATA.

Also note I am writing this off the top of my head..

Fire up an elevated command prompt.

Type (where [return] means press return) :

Diskpart [return]
List disk [return]
(You should now see all attached drives with a corresponding #, if it doesn't show up then it's not attached)
Sel disk # (where # is the disk number) [return]
(NOW BE REALLY SURE YOUVE SELECTED THE CORRECT DISK AS THE NEXT STEP WILL NUKE IT)
Clean [return]

You may be asked to confirm.

Go back into disk management and rescan, it should show as an un-initialised drive and prompt you accordingly.
 
Last edited:
use a free disk partition tool or Fdisk. As has been said previously the disk isn't recognised by the OS. You need to delete the partition information.

You may need to download it from the web depending on what OS you have. it is a DOS program.

I think
Partition Manager 2014 Free Edition

will help.

Format NTFS.
 
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