NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
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 ...
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 :)
What Windows OS are you using? For example, if it's Windows 10, if you right click on the start menu, You'll bring up a menu and you want to click on Disc Managment. This should bring up all the Hard drives, even those not mounted to windows and you can't see. Then you can mount it and windows will then be able to see it. Then you can format it.
Goes without saying, make sure you are doing the correct HDD.
I am using Windows 10 but I also have Windows 7 available. My intention was to use the disk in a USB enclosure to use on either a PC or a Mac. The disk works on a PC until I plug it in the Mac and then it loses half the space, it says the disk contains a protected Windows partition.
I suspect that the problem may be the USB interface itself, I have removed all the NAS partitions but there seems to be some other information that is on the drive. I have ordered a new enclosure and will try it again once I have that.
If the drive is empty, zero it out and reformat as a single partition on the Mac. Confirm the volume shows the expected capacity. Reformat on the Windows machine if you do not want to format it on the Mac with a Windows-compatible format.
It sounds like some kind of HDD format misunderstanding. I'm not really a Mac person, but they normally have their own HDD format called HFS+ which also recently just changed on iOS and I think MacOS or soon on MacOS to (APFS) Apple Files System. So you can't format to that as Window's can't read it. But the Mac should be able to read the Windows formated HDD's.
You may want to look into some of these solutions.
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/native-ntfs-osx/
followed by https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/NTFS-3G
So one of these may be a solution to your issue or something else.
You may not be able to access the filesystem inside those partitions from a Windows machine. But Apple didn't re-invent GPT and MBR, so you should be able to delete these partitions from Windows.
If OP has a Linux Mint, then use dd to zero-out the partition table is the easiest, most reliable way.
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
