Windows 10: Raw formatted my external

well, at least you figured it out.

 

Yeah, I did. *Smile

 

@CliffS

I couldn't stand it, so I drug the jump drive out of the trash and figured out how to "try" Ubuntu. *Dinesh

So, I followed your instructions, but other than my two Windows partitions, even Ubuntu didn't see the Lexar Jump Drive, so I have now proclaimed it well and truly dead, never to be bothered with again.

 

It needs a proper burial:

 

how did it get into that state? did you just format it too many times?

 

No, I followed someone's instructions to format it, which was the first time I'd ever formatted the drive. So I don't know exactly what happened, but I've already replaced it with a couple more Flash Drives.

 

is it just not showing up in the drive lists? because you can fix that with the program I used, it wasnt showing up either .

 

I had an 8gb flash drive that was messed up. Windows couldn't fix it. So I booted up Linux Mint and use the Gparted program that comes with it to delete all partitions on the 8gb flash drive. Then I went back into Windows 10 to re-partition and format the flash drive. It took a couple of attempts in Linux Mint and Windows 10 to finally restore the 8gb flash drive to working order, but now it's fixed.

 

mine didn't show up in gparted but it showed up in "Active@ Data Studios"

 

I hope this is on topic but I just did a clean install of Win 10 Pro on my new PC & attempted to long format a new external storage drive several times, every time it finished w/o error as RAW, I finally did a quick format for the heck of it and it seemed to work, Is there a reason I cannot long format &/or should I worry about the health of the drive? CrystalDiskInfo reads the drive status as Good Health.

 

A quick format, NTFS with defaults, and a Good Health status should be all you need. Test it manually by randomly copying files/folders, rebooting with it attached, delete some of the files, move them around. etc, etc. If it still shows up in My PC and you can do anything you want with it, you're good to go. Make a nice image backup to it of your clean install Win 10 Pro. *Smile

Macrium Free is highly recommended here on Tenforums.

Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free

 

Yeah, I have too much much data of this sort to afford redundancy, about 73+TB until hard dives get bigger & cheaper, so I take my chances.
I've had drives go to RAW in the past with 100% loss but never at first formatting, I don't understand why 10 seems to do this.

 

Guess it boils down to what your data is. If you download movies and tv shows, and lose them, ypu can always download them again.

If you were a photographer and created your own data, then you really should have a backup.

As long as you know the risk, you make the call.

 

I have a RAID 1 for the smaller internal drives.

 

Well I just moved 400+GB to the new drive, when it dropped out but did not reconnect (like it did a few times prior in the move & was able to resume), I reboot & now the old drive is reading as Not Initialized/Unallocated & the new "Healthy" drive is indeed reading as RAW, I'm doing this remotely from work so I can't power cycle the docking station, but I REALLY hope I didn't just lose that, but fear I have.