Hi all. I am having an issue formatting a new Hard Drive that I bought for back-up. I have a 2 TB drive that is hooked up via USB 3.0 in an external enclosure. I logged in as admin and used Windows 7 Disk Manager to start formatting the drive -- I chose NOT to do the quick format.
Anyway, after about 3 hours the progress indicator was still at 0, and it didn't seem like the hard drive was working very hard (no lights, fan in the enclosure was idle). My impatience got the best of me and I decided to cancel the process. This was evidently a mistake. When I clicked cancel, Windows gave me a pop-up saying that it failed to cancel the operation. The pop-up had the options of 'retry' or 'cancel'. Clicking 'retry' gave me the same error message over and over. Clicking 'cancel' appeared to stop the process... but I have a feeling it did nothing. I tried to go back into disk manager and it would just be frozen, not able to get to the screen to view any of my drives. I tried to restart windows... and windows is now stuck on the 'shutting down' dialog. I decided to let Windows do its thing overnight... woke up and it is still going. It's been about 10 hours now.
My questions...
Is there any way to tell if windows is still trying to format the drive or if its just stuck in no-man's land? I don't think I can get away from the 'shutting down' screen to even use my computer in the meantime. My only option is wait longer (with no progress indicator) or manually restart the machine with the power button. Yes, I know I probably should have just never canceled the process in the first place but it is too late for that...
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Anyway, after about 3 hours the progress indicator was still at 0, and it didn't seem like the hard drive was working very hard (no lights, fan in the enclosure was idle). My impatience got the best of me and I decided to cancel the process. This was evidently a mistake. When I clicked cancel, Windows gave me a pop-up saying that it failed to cancel the operation. The pop-up had the options of 'retry' or 'cancel'. Clicking 'retry' gave me the same error message over and over. Clicking 'cancel' appeared to stop the process... but I have a feeling it did nothing. I tried to go back into disk manager and it would just be frozen, not able to get to the screen to view any of my drives. I tried to restart windows... and windows is now stuck on the 'shutting down' dialog. I decided to let Windows do its thing overnight... woke up and it is still going. It's been about 10 hours now.
My questions...
Is there any way to tell if windows is still trying to format the drive or if its just stuck in no-man's land? I don't think I can get away from the 'shutting down' screen to even use my computer in the meantime. My only option is wait longer (with no progress indicator) or manually restart the machine with the power button. Yes, I know I probably should have just never canceled the process in the first place but it is too late for that...
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
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