Windows 10: cant format external drive

i have a segate goflex desk 1TB drive attached by USB3 to my router. I can see the drive in ThisPC but the format function is greyed out. i want to delete everything on there but there is a backup that takes up like 800 GB and it fails to delete it after 2-3 hours.

any suggestions?

:)

 

Format an external Drive.

Hello Roger,

Thank you for posting your concern in Microsoft Community and welcome to the Windows 10 Family.

I would suggest you to follow the below steps to format the drive you are referring to.

• Right Click on Start menu and select Open Computer Management.
  
• 
  In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management.
  
• 
  Right-click the volume that you want to format, and then click Format.
  
• 
  To format the volume with the default settings, in the Format dialog box, click
  OK, and then click OK again.
  

Note: You cannot format a disk or partition that is currently in use, including the partition that contains Windows.

Hope it helps.

Thank you.

 

want to Format a La Cie External Drive Because the Software Genie 9 has too many versions of backup.

Hello,

To format an external USB or an external hard drive you can easily do it by accessing Computer Management. For us to assist you, we suggest that you follow the steps listed below:

• Press the Start button.
• Type Computer Management.
• On the left side, click on Disk Management under Storage.
• Locate the drive that you want to format.
• Once located, right-click on the drive and choose Format.

If the hard drive has not been formatted with the steps that we have provided above, we recommend that you contact the manufacturer of your hard drive. Some hard drive requires a software that you'll need to use just to format it.

Let us know how it goes and if you need further assistance, feel free to post back.

 

How To Format A Write Protected Flash Memory ?

¿You already tried this one?...

Run CMD


1. diskpart
2. list disk

Then in the 3º step, put the correct number of disk in the list for the usb flash (if it's listed in disk 3, then you'll have to write select disk 3).

2. select disk #
3. clean
4. create partition primary
5. select partition 1
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. assign
9. exit

with that commands you will format the flash drive in fat32, if you have a large drive you can select also "format fs=ntfs" in step 7.

good luck!