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I have purchased 2 WD red 3tb drives to store my music library (it has outgrown the 1tb drives). One drive is the library, the other is backup. They will be housed in a Vantec 2 drive enclosure, connected via e-sata. I'm formatting them with windows 7 disc manager. The first drive seemed to format fine, although it took awhile. Windows disc manager indicated it was being formatted and showed progress as a percent. The second drive is recognized by Disc manager, but when told to format, process seems to hang. Disc manager says it is formatting, but it does not show any kind of progress as it did with the other drive. Would this indicate a bad disc?

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  • Are you doing a quick format, or a full format? Also, what version of Windows 7 do you have (SP1?)? If you try the drive on a different computer and in a different enclosure (or directly connected) and it still doesn't work, then I would think the drive is bad.
    – Darth Android
    Commented Nov 19, 2012 at 20:54
  • Doing a full format. Tried it on a win7 and a vista machine, same result. Using a dock, same dock that was used to successfully format the first disc.
    – Jim
    Commented Nov 19, 2012 at 21:13
  • Test the drive using WD's Data Lifeguard Diagnostic utility. If it comes up fine, try and connect it directly to your PC or via a single drive enclosure and format it, then drop it into the Vantec.
    – Karan
    Commented Nov 20, 2012 at 18:04
  • WDs Data Lifeguard Diagnostic utility indicates the drive is bad. Great tip! Thanks much. The WD utility is something every computer owner should know about.
    – Jim
    Commented Nov 21, 2012 at 3:03
  • That could mean that the disk is bad but it could also mean other kind of problems: SATA, compatibility, overclocking, software... Are you runnging it from Windows?
    – skan
    Commented Aug 22, 2013 at 17:30

1 Answer 1

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I would try two things:

1) command line format, start -> run -> cmd enter and type in format drive /FS:NTFS /X

or

2) You can download HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

If neither one those work and you already tried the disk manager approach, I would say, yes it is possible, it's a bad HDD.

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