USB 3 Mass Storage | seen by Lenovo not Dell | dban wont clear

[Wes046]

Is there a command line tutorial on disk formatting?

If anyone can tell me the cause: I Don't want to do this again.
I use toshiba canvios for backup on both Lenovo Laptop and Dell Tower.
At some point the Dell one would only be recognized by my Lenovo.
Both Machines run W7 Pro 64.
The Dell recognized other Toshiba usb 3.0 drives.
Used the Lenovo to transfer backups from the "dell" drive.
Dell saw the problem drive & installed drivers, Windows would not mount it.
Could not reformat the bad drive using Windows or even a Separately Booted Spotmau disk.
Tried Dban (CD Boot). 24 hrs later: Neither Lenovo or Dell, Windows would not mount. ( 1 complete dban pass and no disk errors)

Plugging the problem drive into either PC (post dban) now caused them to Crash.

In in the end I plugged problem drive in to my iMac which promptly said:
"Needs Initialization", Formatted Fat 32 with an MBR partition. Result:
Instantly recognized by both PCs. Reformatted on the Dell PC NTFS. All is well.
Time: Less than 10 minutes.

Back in the stage where the System would install drivers but Dell Windows would not mount it, where can I find command line prompts to reformat/partition the drive. A link will do. (The Dell W7 was a clean install but without the raft of windows updates that follow a clean install. That's another issue

I'm posting this for those who have an ornery drive they want to reformat which the system can see but windows, for what ever reason, ignores. Mac may be one solution.

TIA
wbajr tbc

 

[Megahertz07]

Use Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc). Or right click Computer - Manage - Disk Management
Delete all partitions on the disk, create new and format as NTFS.
You wont be able to use on MAC as it doesn't deal with NTFS

The command line is Diskpart, but I don't recommend It to you as with a wrong command you can erase all windows disk.

You can also use Bootable Partition Manager| MiniTool Partition Wizard Bootable Edition