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I have to admit defeat ... I cannot format a hard drive ...

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barney:
Folk,

This is embarrassing.  I'm trying to format a 1T [internal] HD.  Easus Partition Manager pukes, DOS-level pukes (from CMD line), Kubuntu/Ubuntu both puke  :-[.

And they don't tell me why  :huh:.  

'Twasn't that many years agone that I could do a low-level format, but seems that ability has evaporated with time.  I remember RLL, MLM, maybe several others whose abbreviations no longer occur to me.  But I simply cannot format this one particular drive.  It once hosted WinXP, Win7, a couple of Linux distros.  But now I cannot format/clear it from any OS I have available.

HELP!?!P

BTW, just in case, I'm not trying to format it from an OS mounted upon it - it's been erased of all content, although I couldn't get rid of some of the Windows dirs.

(Modified for notifications  :-[.)

Carol Haynes:
If you want to wipe the whole drive why not just delete all of the partitions and then build a new partition table? You should be able to format the new partitions.

If you have a Easeus Partition Manager recovery disk you should be able to boot from that and do the necessary - unless there is a hardware fault on the drive.

MilesAhead:
Did you try diskpart on cmd line?

Commands should run something like this in an admin prompt:

diskpart

list disk

{ make sure you correctly select the disk you're going to erase }

select disk n    (where n is the number shown by list disk to be the erasure candidate)

clean  (this cleans everything off so get the right disk)

create partition primary


Now you should be able to format NTFS or whatever.  Here's the ref page:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415



edit: should be "select disk n" not "select n" but in any case, follow the MS docs. But I've used this sequence to format new disks I've purchased and also to erase format and create bootable USB keys.

edit2: many of the online tips regarding diskpart leave out the clean step. So you mess around and no matter what you do you can't format or create partitions because the disk was never blanked.

lanux128:
since the contents are already erased, you may want to try Darik's Boot and Nuke.

MilesAhead:
This is one of those tasks made a lot easier if you have a docking station. Once you clean, create a partition and format, just pull the drive and it's all ready to use in any machine or in a dock.  Plus it makes it obvious which drive you are cleaning since it will usually refer to USB something or other when the do List Disk command.

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