Forum Discussion

Guide

Apr 22, 2017

Solved

Reusing a NAS disk in a PC

I have a 4GB disk that I have removed from a ReadyNAS 104 and I would like to install into a PC. I don't seem to be able to format the disk in any way that will regain all its space, there appear to ...

Installation & Upgrade

rogjack
Apr 26, 2017
I have now found the problem, it was the USB hard drive caddy that I use to transfer from one machine to another. It doesn't seem to like drives over 1.5GB in capacity and gets really confused. I have now replaced it with a new USB3 enclosure and it sees the entire capacity of the drive and NO protected windows partitions. I think the old enclosure was misreading the drives and interpreting the results incorrectly.

Thanks to everyone that replied, I got a lot of new information and a couple of useful utilities so that's a gain :)

jak0lantash

Mentor

Apr 22, 2017

Delete all partitions on that drive and create a new one.

rogjack

Guide

Apr 22, 2017

I have tried disk manager, diskpart and partition wizard and none of them are able to do the job. I can see two hidden partitions in disk wizard but they cannot be deleted, they appear to be protected partitions. They are the first partitions on the disk and give particular problems if I try to view the disk on a Mac, it only shows one partition of half the disk capacity.

StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Apr 22, 2017
Download Western Digital's Lifeguard program (Windows), and use it's write-zeros "advanced" test. It shoild then ask if you want the quick or full test. Quick is fine.

That will zero the sectors that hold partition informatoin, and return the disk to an unformatted state.
- rogjack
  Guide
  Apr 22, 2017
  OK, thanks. The WD Lifeguard seems to have done it. The menus are a bit different in that there is no zero option in the latest version but the quick format seems to have cleared out the old partitions.
  
  Thanks again for the help. :manhappy:
  - coloatty
    Luminary
    Apr 22, 2017
    On Macs, I have used Drive Genius (and maybe Mac OS X Disk Utility) to zero out NAS drives that otherwise won't initialize. I usually use "Shred" in Drive Genius 3 because I have it. I terminate the zeroing about 1-2% into the process, which is enough to wipe the partition protection and enable the drive to be reformatted.