Any good software to format portable Hard disk

[skygaikwad]

Hey guys does any one know any good software to format portable hard disk rather than windows default.
The thing is There has been bad sector in my hard disk .Its copying and pasting speed get reduces and many of file in my hard-disk are so bad that i am unable to copy it.
Even the movies store in harddisk hangs after some time.
So I am formating my harddisk ...
Please any suggestion to my problem .....
Telll me any good software ... which will increase copying and pasting speed, recover bad sector and etc .....:sarc:

 

[Roderunner]

Try this first.

 

[AllOnTheBus]

You may also like to try using the tools from Parted Magic.
You'll need to either burn an ISO to make a bootable disk
or you can also use the software by creating a bootable
flash drive.

FInd further info and dowload here: downloads

 

[Corazon]

If you're having that much trouble with your portable harddisk, you may want to think about replacing it altogether.
You can reformat it and mark bad sectors in the process (Windows itself does this just fine) but you'll invariably end up with more bad sectors and eventually total failure. And that means total loss of all data.

 

[jumanji]

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. Download from here .

Does exactly what it is supposed to do - and more specifically, when and where others won't.

 

[Corazon]

Isn't the HP tool meant strictly for USB flash drives (and making them bootable)?

 

[jumanji]

Not necessarily.

For a longtime I was also under that impression. That was until I came across this bit of interesting information.

Number of users have problems removing the irritant Smartware VCD on the Western Dgital USB external drives.

A simple solution suggested is to format it with the HP format tool.

And this woke me up to the fact that it can format external HDDs too.

And Softpedia review says that it is one tool that every Windows user should have on his PC.

EDIT: You may read this interesting article http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/passport-vcd.html

 

[Corazon]

I would expect Softpedia to say that about almost anything. :sarc: Sounds like marketing-speak to me.

But then, wouldn't a simple clean in Diskpart followed by a fresh, new partition suffice if the goal is to wipe out that VCD image?

 

[jumanji]

...But then, wouldn't a simple clean in Diskpart followed by a fresh, new partition suffice if the goal is to wipe out that VCD image?

I really do not know. That hidden partition is in UDF Format. That is why most conventional tools cannot remove it, fdisk, Gparted included. - and HP Format tool can as confirmed by users..Will Diskpart remove an UDF partition? If that was so simple people wouldn't have been so desperate and it would have been mentioned. There are lots of posts and threads on it. ( It is not a Video CD image, it is Virtual CDROM drive.)

So my statement holds - Does exactly what it is supposed to do - and more specifically, when and where others won't.

 

[Corazon]

Fair enough - it's just that I know clean is designed to wipe out any partition information altogether and make the disk look like a brandnew, truly empty disk to Windows (which then needs reinitialized). It does so by indiscriminately erasing the first and last 2048 physical sectors of the disk and filling them with zeroes.

This method is practically foolproof, or should be - but just to be safe, I like to instruct Diskpart to rescan after a clean command as well, forcing the system to recheck all disks and their state and update its own disk information.

 

[carwiz]

I have an external HDD connected via USB-3 that I can't get Diskpart to clean. It's a drive I robbed from my XP machine that was used as a backup. I just moved it from a USB-2 enclosure to a USB-3 enclosure. It has an "OEM Partition" that I can't delete. I was about to ask about it and ran across this thread. Is this a limitation of Diskpart on external drives?

 

[Corazon]

That drive might be configured to have a DCO (drive configuration overlay) area in its firmware for the OEM partition to live in, essentially making it inaccessible except by custom software - that's my guess.
You would need a low-level HDD tool to reset this DCO and restore the drive to its native full capacity.

 

[carwiz]

Just a quick follow up - The HP utility didn't work for me. It returned a "Locked Drive" error so I tried this one:
Download HDD Low Level Format Tool 4.12 Free - Utility for low-level hard disk drive formatting - Softpedia

It worked like a champ and I was able to get the full drive capacity back using Windows Format Wizard. I took a screen shot after it finished. It was quick--Less than a second.

 

[mjf]

I'm not sure what they mean in this case by low level formatting. I thought the ability to truly do low level formatting wasn't possible with modern disks?? I thought it was done during manufacture.
(this is a question by the way).

 

[carwiz]

It's not really a "true low level format" but it does initialize the disk. There is an option in the HDDGURU program I used to specify the sector size but I choose Default and selected the Quick Wipe (lower right check box) that just clears the MBR and partitions. And it worked on the drive connected via USB. It basically put it back to factory form.

 

[jumanji]

Good to know what to do in case of other persistent and specific problems. Thanks carwiz.