# Formatting crashed external hard drive



## beno_83au (Aug 16, 2010)

A while ago my external hard drive crash but after plenty of searching and trial and error I found a program that managed to recover what I wanted from it. Now though I would like to format it so that I can begin using it again, however the easy "right click - format" doesn't work, nothing at all happens when I try it, it just laggs for a bit then I'm back to square one. Trying to go through computer management and the disk management doesn't work either, saying the format didn't complete successfully just after I try it. What else can I do to get it formatted?

Cheers.


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## ElenaP (Aug 17, 2010)

What was the filesystem type on the external hard drive? What filesystem are you trying to format it for? 

Regardless of what filesystem type you need, try to format the drive to NTFS via Disk Management. if this works, you can then reformat the drive to FAT or FAT32 if needed.


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## MMM (Aug 18, 2010)

beno_83au said:


> A while ago my external hard drive crash but after plenty of searching and trial and error I found a program that managed to recover what I wanted from it. Now though I would like to format it so that I can begin using it again, however the easy "right click - format" doesn't work, nothing at all happens when I try it, it just laggs for a bit then I'm back to square one. Trying to go through computer management and the disk management doesn't work either, saying the format didn't complete successfully just after I try it. What else can I do to get it formatted?
> 
> Cheers.


If you are using the correct disk management software for your particular hard drive and it is failing to reformat or fix the error then it sounds like you hard drive is faulty.


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