Hi everyone

 

I am in process of building my second tower and am using 3TB hard drives now. I have some 750GB and 1TB hard drives from my previous build that I dont need for unraid  now and would like to use them for my secondary  OC build. How do I reformat them for PC use/NTFS? I tried attaching one via USB dock to the PC. Under disk management I can see the disk and capacity but it doesnt get andy labelk/vulme assigned, and when I right click all the options are greyed out so I cant format or do anything with it. I dont know  if I can do anything with cmd either as there is no volume /letter assigned to that drive and I cant seem to assign it myself either.

 

Thanks

Mani

I think the quickest thing to do, would be to boot from a live gparted CD/USB and format it with that.

 

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

 

not sure why its not letting you do anything, it might be a ownership, permissions thing.

Assuming you are on win 7 or 2008 (vista also).

 

just use the diskpart command from the command line.

select the drive you want to wipe and type "clean"

tada. raw disk... then just set it up in disk manager (or in diskpart if you want).

 

that is how I reclaim used ESX thumbdrives that have 2000 partitions on them.

 

USE THE TOOL WITH CAUTION.. if you accidentally select the wrong drive.. well you get the idea.

 

the manual for diskpart http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465%28WS.10%29.aspx

How do I select the drive I want to clean , because it doesnt show any drive letter or volume in the disk management ??

Also can you please give the  exact commands and sequence ...I am not that good at cmd

 

 

Thanks

Mani

I am a bit to lazy to type all that out right now... so I googled it for you...

 

first hit... http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/52129-disk-clean-clean-all-diskpart-command.html

 

use CLEAN not CLEAN ALL

I have done this several times but it was a while back and don't remember the exact steps. But from disk management you should have the option to delete the partitions on the disk. Then you can create a new partition for Windows to use. Make sure you run with admin privileges.

I have done this several times but it was a while back and don't remember the exact steps. But from disk management you should have the option to delete the partitions on the disk. Then you can create a new partition for Windows to use. Make sure you run with admin privileges.

If you just want to "unformat" you can use the "-z" option of the preclear)disk.sh command.  It will zero the master-boot-record of a disk, it runs in a few seconds, and is fairly safe. 

 

preclear_disk.sh -z /dev/sdX

where sdX = the drive to be "unformatted"

 

Joe L.

I have done this several times but it was a while back and don't remember the exact steps. But from disk management you should have the option to delete the partitions on the disk. Then you can create a new partition for Windows to use. Make sure you run with admin privileges.

 

Hi

I tried this and it worked. Right click on the disk in disk management  ( it still had no drive letter or volume )  , and clicked on delete volume. Then refreshed the drives and right clicked and reformatted that drive in NTFS , took 2 minutes per drive.

 

Thanks

Mani