(uncommon?) problem with external hard drive

suez said:

Thank you, but I have already tried this many times. The drive shows in Partition Wizard. I can manipulate (format/delete/erase/shrink etc) the other partitions without a problem. The problem partition, nothing can be done to it. It justs sticks at 0%. It cannot even be deleted.

OK. Try this. Right click on that partition and change Partition Type ID as shown in the screenshot below.



Once Partition Type is changed to normal NTFS, try deleting the partition in Partition Wizard..

You can try using DBAN. It's free for personal use. Just boot from the CD (and make sure you're nuking the right drive). If that doesn't work, or you want to go further, take the drive apart and remove the platter(s). They're smaller than a CD. You can drill holes through them, place them in a bit of muratic acid (careful with that...and store any leftover outside in a safe spot. Just the fumes will eat up nearby metal) or whatever. It's simple to do. And the magnet in a drive is strong and can be useful. I reduced 5 hard drives to a small stack of shiny platters in minutes.

Nothing could interact with that partition - it could not be modified, deleted, formatted etc.. when I try to format/delete etc the entire drive in one go, it will do the operation on the other partition before it, then stop when it gets to that partition. Simply nothing could interact with it in terms of modifying the data on it, thankfully however I was able to recover the data I needed from it.

In the end I just physically destroyed the thing.