New
#1
Can't format an HDD
Win 7 64
I recently reinstalled my OS onto my SSD. I have three 500gb caviar black Western Digital drives that I use for storage. One of them was giving me trouble always checking for consistency right after the new OS installation. I unplugged it and updated all of the windows drivers etc, plugged it back in and it started working.
I was not satisfied with that so I decided to reformat it and reimage it. It was working until two days ago. I was able to look at the drive, browse the folders, open files, etc. It was sometimes slow, but it did work.
I decided to do a non-quick format and let it run while I was at work. When I came home, it was hardly showing any progress. Since it appeared that nothing had happened, I cancelled the format and tried to do a quick format. That did not work and just says unable to format or something like that.
I also tried running a format through the command prompt and I get "format failed".
chkdsk does not work with RAW file format.
I used the Western Digital data diagnostic utility and it passes the SMART check, but when I run the extended test it goes extremely slow saying something like 350 hours (basically two weeks of nonstop testing). I let it run over night to see if it was going slow but would eventually pick up speed but that did not happen.
I don't know if the drive is broken yet. Are there any other utilities that I can use on it? It still shows up, Windows does not try to check consistency on bootup, and it passes the SMART test in about 2 minutes.