Formating a USB HDD

talking_walnut

Anyone know how I can format a 2.5" laptop hard drive that I want to use as an external drive. I have a usb 2 ide cable but the drive is formated in some weird file system (its from an old rio riot if that helps anyone) and I can't find a way to format it.

vibe666

if it's being detected in windows and installed when you plug it in then you should still get a drive icon in my computer and just right click and choose format if you want to do it the easy way, although if this isn't working for you partition magic will do the job from within windows.

or depending on whether your mobo supports usb devices at boot or not, you might be able to use fdisk, or other partitioning tools such as this: www.ubd.com or www.ultimatebootcd.com or similar.

failing that, either stick it in a laptop and partition it there using the above tools, or get a 2.5" to 3.5" HDD adapter from compustore and stick it onto a spare ide channel.

tman

if you're using windows xp, go into the control panel, administrative tools & then computer managment.
you should be able to do it from there (disk tools) if windows isn't recognising the current partition in my computer.

Clinical Waste

Originally posted by vibe666
.......failing that, either stick it in a laptop and partition it there using the above tools, or get a 2.5" to 3.5" HDD adapter from compustore and stick it onto a spare ide channel.

this will do it. And KillDisk or LLF it to be 100% in destroying the old file system.