The Blog of Graham

I was formatting a USB external hard drive with NTFS (same thing would apply to FAT I believe). I unchecked quick format which meant it took an age on the large 750GB hard drive, so I thought I would cancel it. The drive was then not recognised my Windows (I am using Windows 7). So I thought I would use Linux to format the drive, put a new partition on it with fdisk or parted but Linux didn’t recognise it either!

I was getting worried now, I tried a different USB cable but to no avail. Finally I simply unplugged the power from the drive and put it back in again and Windows 7 recognised the drive and helpfully asked if I wanted to format it. Phew.

Let that be a lesson to anyone who reads this (or finds it using Google), don’t slow format a large drive with NTFS unless you can wait for a long time.

Posted on February 17th, 2010 by Graham
Filed under: General, Linux, Random