How-To Geek

Over the summer I crashed my laptop's hard drive and decided to upgrade to an SSD. I would like to use the old hard drive as external storage, but I can't seem to reformat it. My computer spent 2 weeks doing a long format, and that ended up failing.
Disk Management won't let me delete the partition or volume. I downloaded partition wizard, but that won't even try. I've seen some command prompt commands, but my system doesn't recognize the commands.

When the disk crashed, my computer wouldn't boot at all. It would get to the "Windows Starting" screen, and never get passed it. I couldn't do anything with it with a linux live CD, and I'm unsuccessful with Windows as well.

Anyone have more suggestions? I can answer questions if you have any.

I used the Seagate tool, and it says there are unreadable sectors. The long generic test couldn't fix it. After some searching, I found that the error is a cyclic redundancy check error, which is apparently un-repairable. Too bad, I was hoping to make it my second back-up drive.

Laptop HDDs cannot be exchanged via the HDDs manufacturers' warranty. They have to be RMA'd through the Laptop's warranty.
Unless, of course, that defective hdd was bought seperately from the laptop.

--edit: at least that's how it works in Canada for ASUS, Acer, Fujitsu, Lenovo, MSI, Sony, Toshiba and probably the other manufacturers aswell.

It came with the laptop, and since the laptop is over 2 years old I believe my warranty has expired. I'll live, I was just hoping to have a secondary backup drive.