Broken Hard Drive

**Zoomy** · March 12th, 2010, 08:49 AM

My girlfriend has a portable hard-drive, a 1TB western digital. One day, she plugged it into her comp and it came up something along the lines of "windows needs to format. Do you want to format?".

We managed to save her data using a data recovery tool, before trying to format it. The green line got all the way to the other end before an error message popped up; windows was unable to format the disk. Tried it again, and the error appeared at the start, before the green bar started filling up.

Now she's left with an expensieve brick. Please help.

**Steve R Jones** · March 12th, 2010, 09:07 AM

What happens when you plug it into your pc?

**Zoomy** · March 12th, 2010, 09:17 AM

Nothing at first, then it comes up "You need to format the disk in drive I:. Format now?". I right click on the drive and it claims to be 0.0B in capacity.

**Steve R Jones** · March 12th, 2010, 09:58 AM

So...same thing on two different pc's....

Start->Run-> Diskmgmt.msc
I would zap the partition and then recreate it and format...

**Zoomy** · March 12th, 2010, 10:17 AM

It's working now! Thank you Mr. Jones!

**evereddie** · March 12th, 2010, 10:50 AM

Pretty sure sign this drive is failing and will fail again. There should be a utility that came with the drive for checking it.

**Zoomy** · March 12th, 2010, 10:55 AM

Originally Posted by evereddie

Pretty sure sign this drive is failing and will fail again. There should be a utility that came with the drive for checking it.

Good thing there's a years guarantee that expires in octoberish.

**Steve R Jones** · March 12th, 2010, 11:37 AM

Mr Jones be my daddy...But you're welcome.

Be sure and use the safely remove funtion from now on

**Pirate34** · October 21st, 2012, 01:52 AM

Similar problem except my computer continues to attempt to read the hard drive; fails and then starts again.

When I bring up Disk management it only does anything for the half second between failing and starting again