Old IDE HDD to use in enclosure

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ADNAMC

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Apr 7, 2013
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I recently bought an enclosure for a couple hdd's i had laying around in my house, when i connect them to the computer, it doesnt assign them a letter. the hdds have windows vista on them. i went into disk management to partition them but it doesnt work. I dont care about the information i had on those hdds, i just want to use them as external storage. any idea how i can format them?
 
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SchizTech

SchizTech

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Jan 16, 2011
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Download a gparted live .iso, burn it to disk and boot from that. Just make sure you select the right disk to format and don't delete your system drive accidentally! Choose ntfs to make sure Windows recognizes the file system; since gparted is a Linux based disk it will want to use a linux filesystem by default.
 
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ADNAMC

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Apr 7, 2013
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Im using windows 7, not sure if that program would work, also I have the hdd plugged through a usb, so im trying to see if there is a program that could initialized the drive because everytime i try to do it with from disk management it says "data error (cyclic redundancy test)"
 
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ADNAMC

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Apr 7, 2013
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disk management wont give me any option since the hdd is not initialized yet, and I cant initialized it from disk management
 
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SchizTech

SchizTech

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That data error could be caused by a failing HDD. You might want to use disk diagnostic software to verify that those old hard drives are still good. If you know the manufacturer of the drives go to the manufacturer's website and download the software.

As far as the boot disk the version of Windows you run won't matter since it won't run from Windows (it will be a disk you boot the PC from.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Mar 16, 2013
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ahhh...new information.
What have you done to determine why this isn't simply a bad HD.
 
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ADNAMC

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Apr 7, 2013
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it's a western digital hd, and as SchizTech suggested i downloaded the disk diagnostic tool for the model and did a quick test and it passed, so im guessing the hd is ok
 
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ADNAMC

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Apr 7, 2013
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so with this program to boot the PC from, would I be able to format a HDD that is plugged in through a usb port?
 
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SchizTech

SchizTech

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Yes, it should. It's still a bit odd for a good hard drive to have given you those errors in Windows, so I wouldn't put too much trust in those old drives. At least run the full length test to be more thorough.


 
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ADNAMC

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Apr 7, 2013
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yeah I'm already doing an extended test on the HD and as of right now is estimated to finish in 2 hours (is a 500gb HD), in the meantime I will start downloading the program you said. Thanks

Also i just checked on gparted live, and it says is for x86 based computers, mine is a x64. would there be a problem?
 
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