- #FORCE FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE HOW TO#
- #FORCE FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE SOFTWARE#
- #FORCE FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WINDOWS#
#FORCE FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE SOFTWARE#
Instead, use an external hard drive recovery software such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional immediately to get back your lost and inaccessible files from a corrupt, damaged, formatted or missing hard drive partition.Īnd remember to keep a regular backup of your important files on at least two different storage media such as external drive and cloud. Formatting such damaged external hard drive can complicate the recovery process. Never format an internal or external hard drive volume if it turns inaccessible or RAW. If it fails to format, comment down below for more help. You must run defragmentation and check hard disk SMART status to ensure if your external hard drive is in good health. This should ideally format your external hard drive without any error. Finally, type exit and press ‘ Enter’ to exit the DiskPart utility. You may change X to any empty/unassigned drive letter. You can change StellarDrive in the above command with your desired disk name. Then type format FS=NTFS label=StellarDrive quick and press ‘ Enter.’ Type select partition 1 and press ‘ Enter.’ Type create primary partition and press ‘ Enter.’ Then type list disk to ensure that the correct disk is selected. Please identify the disk number correctly before entering the command. PLEASE NOTE: The above command is an example. Let’s suppose the disk is disk 3 in the list, type following command and press ‘ Enter.’ Now carefully check the listed disks and then identify the affected hard drive.į. A typo can cause lead to severe consequences.Ĭ. However, be careful while following the commands and instructions given below. DiskPart is a powerful tool and can handle serious drive errors.
#FORCE FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WINDOWS#
Step 5: Force Format using DiskPart UtilityĭiskPart is a command line based disk management utility in Windows that gives you advanced access control over formatting and other disk management tasks. Enter the ‘ Volume Label’ and choose a ‘ File System.’ĭ. To recover lost or inaccessible data from your external hard drive that refuses to format, follow the steps below:Ĭ. After getting back your lost and inaccessible data from damaged hard drive, you can follow the next steps to fix the format error. For this, use a DIY data recovery tool such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional. In such cases, you need to perform external hard drive recovery as soon as possible to prevent permanent data loss. “Windows was unable to complete the format or external hard drive cannot be formatted.” “You need to format disk drive before you can use it.” “Your hard disk drive is not formatted do you want to format it now.” When a hard drive turns to RAW on the Windows operating system, you may come across several error messages as shown below: Similarly, unsafe removal and improper handling can also lead to similar errors. If a system is infected, it can infect the external hard drive, corrupt files, and damage the file system-making the drive inaccessible or RAW. Since they are often connected to various systems, external hard drives are more vulnerable to corruption and other logical disk errors.
#FORCE FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE HOW TO#
Summary: This blog explains how to perform external hard drive recovery and get back files from an inaccessible, damaged, or corrupt external hard drive, which fails to format.Įxternal hard drives are generally used as a portable storage media to backup data and transfer large files between systems. Steps to Fix Format Error after External Hard Drive Recovery.