How-To Geek

I have an LG external hard drive which I unplugged one day without doing the safe eject. Now it won't work. The computer recognize its existence on the F drive and disk management says the status is healthy (primary partition) But it will not format. Under File system, the drive is described as RAW. I do not need to recover the data but I got it only six months ago and hate to have to throw it away and buy a new one. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks Mike but the formatting was unsuccessful because it is a RAW volume. I tried doing the formatting from Disk Management but that did not work either. Any thoughts on what else can be done? The status is still marked as healthy

take the drive out of the enclosure. get a new enclosure or a USB 'bridge' that reads sATA and try above stuff again. and get a fresh USB cord

Hi 202D - thanks for the suggestion but I am a bit of a novice. What is an enclosure and how do I take the drive out? Is there a link you know that explains these things?

8% in 6 hours does not sound right. Do the following>

Go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt. Right click on Command Prompt and "Run as Administrator". Into the black window type:

chkdsk /f

Then press Enter. That will run for a while and fix any bad sectors. When that is done, run these commands in the same window - each followed by Enter

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk n (where n is the number that was given in List Disk for your disk in question)
Format /fs:NTFS Quick

When that is done, continue in the same window

Select disk n (same as above)
Create partition primary

And still in the same window

List volume
Select volume n (n is probably 0)
Assign letter=M (or any other higher letter )
Exit

Now you should have a volume with one partition M that should show in Computer.

When you typed
diskpart
list disk
There should have been a volume assigned to the disk you want to format.
re read the last paragraph that whs posted above.

EDIT: you may need to type
detail volume
to get the volume information

@WHS @Germ-X. Thanks people but no luck. The list volume worked.

The info is:
Volume 5, (LTR) F, no info under Label, (Fs) RAW, (Type) Partition, (Size) 298GB, (Status) Healthy.

Then DISKPART came up and I did the following:

DISKPART> Select Volume 5

Volume 5 is the slected volume

DISKPART> Format /fs:NTFS Quick

The arguments specified for this command for not valid.
for more info type HELP FORMAT

DISKPART> HELP FORMAT
blah blah...A volume must be selected for this operation to succeed
Examples:
FORMAT FS=NTFS LABEL="NEW vOLUME" QUICK COMPRESS
FORMAT RECOMMENDED OVERRIDE

This is where I am up to so far and I did do the chkdsk so I presume the hardware on the external hard drive is OK. Help is much appreciated.

whc brand s good n better to buy???????????

@Raphoenix. Thanks I will give it a try tonight when I go home and let you all know how it goes. I am sure there are many people who have unplugged their USB by mistake.

If you are willing download this free partition utility > burn to Cd > change your boot order > then boot your system and look at your drive.
You will be able to see if it is partitioned correctly then make any corrections as needed. You can also format from PW
http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html
Scroll down about mid page and download the free bootable version