Formating HDD through USB

[quattroman]

Hey Guys.

I am having some trouble with my external HDD.

I am using the GParted Live-cd.

The disk is of 250GB being formated into ext3.

Thing is that I tried several methods to format, GParted in Kubu, Partition Magic on XP, now the Live-cd, but the process is just stuck and 0% and the Blue Light of the Vantec Case is flashing like crazy. In the last 10 minutes is being like this.

Can anybody diagnose what could be wrong.

I will now check Western Digital for some proprietary recovery/format software and a HDD test.


EDIT: fixed spelling mistakes

[SheeEttin]

Re: Formating HDD through USB

I'd say there's something gone wrong at a low level, such that a normal format won't fix it.

What I would do is "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd??". This will overwrite each byte on the disk with a zero. After that, it should sufficently ruin it such that it can be formatted.

Someone else should look at this before you do it, because I am not sure it will do exactly what it's supposed to. One has to be very careful with the dd command.

[quattroman]

Re: Formating HDD through USB

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd??

of=/dev/sd?? meaning where the drive is located right?

I don't want to format my internal HDD with zeros.

[SheeEttin]

Re: Formating HDD through USB

Yes. Make very sure that you're doing it to the right drive. If you do it to the wrong one, it's not likely you'll get your data back.

[quattroman]

Re: Formating HDD through USB

Bellow is what I got...is this correct.

xbox@xboxsrv:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1
Password:
dd: writing to `/dev/sda1': No space left on device
3+0 records in
2+0 records out
1024 bytes (1.0 kB) copied, 0.00958949 seconds, 107 kB/s
xbox@xboxsrv:~$

EDIT: after I did the zero format and got the messege code above, I formated the drive to FAT32, I thought it would be the safest bet, and it actually did work. I had to restart for it to mount and is working now.

Thanks a lot.

[SheeEttin]

Re: Formating HDD through USB

Hm. I wonder why it said that...

Anyway, I'd check to make sure the drive is working properly now.

[quattroman]

Re: Formating HDD through USB

any HDD test available this OS?

[SheeEttin]

Re: Formating HDD through USB

Well, you've got it mounted, so there shouldn't be anything wrong with it. If the reported size of the drive matches its actual size (give or take a bit because manufacturers use "manufacturer bytes", not real bytes), it should be fine.

If you want to make sure, you can fsck it. "man fsck.vfat".