Drive Cleanser
I used Drive Cleanser to prepare an external hard disk for use as backup with my new laptop, running Win 8.1
All seemed OK until I chose Proceed when the Drive Cleanser window disappeared, with no indication of anything happening. Should there not be a progress bar or something? I left it overnight to let the process finish but Windows does not recognise the disk now; how do I get it formatted ( I did check that Format was selected as the Post-wiping Action)?
Can anyone help me save my disk?
Jimmy BT


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Hi Enchantec, thanks for your reply.
Yes, it is connected by USB. I did as you suggest but it is still not showing in "This PC" although it is shown as External HDD in Notification Area and in Device Manager: with latest driver and "This device is working properly"! It also shows in Drive Cleanser, with 148.9 GB unallocated space.
JBT
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Right click on the Windows pane icon in lower left corner of Windows task bar, from the resulting list choose Disk Management. This will open the Disk Management Console which should display the disk as Raw unallocated unpartitioned space. Left click on the drive to select it then, right click on the drive and the resulting context menu will have the option to format the disk which will result in the disk now being available.
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I found and selected the disk in Disk Management but, forgive my ignorance, where do I find the "drive"? It does not appear in the list at the top of the Disk Management window nor in This PC. I tried a right click on the Disk 1 icon, and on the selected "unallocated space" but neither context menu gives the option to format.
JBT
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Do not click on the icon as you put it rather, left click on the unallocated space to select. You should see the space change in appearance, gray shaded commonly. Once selected with cursor over the gray shaded area right click and you should find Format in the resulting menu.
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The unallocated space did change to shaded but right click on the shaded area gives choice of New Simple Volume..., New Spanned Volume..., New Striped Volume..., Properties and Help - no Format!
JBT
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In that case I suggest you once again shutdown the PC, detach the USB drive, restart the PC and once booted attach USB drive preferably to a USB 2.0 port if available. Again you should see in the task bar that Windows is installing device or drivers. Once that process completes again right click the Windows pane icon and choose Computer Management. In the left pane of the resulting screen click on Disk Management. If things are working correctly you should see another window appear showing the newly attached USB disk which should allow you to initialize the disk and to choose either an MBR or GPT format. Mark the appropriate selections and click OK. You should now be able to access the disk.
You must shutdown the PC for this to work, a reboot will not do the trick.
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I followed your advice precisely but there was no indication that Windows was installing the device or drivers. Repeated, with the same result. I tried Computer Management>Disk Management in any case with the same result as my last post: the drive showed as Disk 1, unallocated space, with the same choices after selecting and right clicking!
JBT
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Can you post screenshots of Disk Management and a right click context menu of the drive so that we can see the disk details.
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Sorry for the delay: learning how to get and attach screenshot. Can't get screenshot of right-click context menu but it is
New Simple Volume...
New Spanned Volume...
New Striped Volume...
Properties
Help
Attachment | Size |
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274140-120094.png | 40.75 KB |
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Ok, now that we know the disk in not in a RAW state select Disk 1 again in Disk Management as previously described, right click on selected disk 1 and choose New Simple Volume. This will open the new disk wizard. This will allow you to create a new partition on the disk. See Link below for details.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-format-hard-disk-part…
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Success! Very many thanks for your patient help, Enchantech.
Best wishes, JBT
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