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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 be hidden partitions that I cannot remove.
Can anyone advise me how I can format it back to its original state? I have available Windows 7 and 10, Linux Mint and a Mac.
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 🙂
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
Ya, I know some of them HDD docks had size limitations. 1.5 Gig's seems a little small, but good to know you figured it out. When I built my Windows PC, The case I got for it actually has a built in Bare drive dock on the top of the case I can slide a drive into. Works great. But I do have 2-3 bare drive HDD docks around here also. I know back when I was looking to buy one, some had limitations in the size of the HDD you could use with it. Glad you figured it out. Sometimes you just have to start ruling things out one by one until it works and then you found was was causing the issue. So it's SOLVED!!!
The old caddy I was using was probably only USB1, it was very old. I used to use a pair of hotswappable caddies that would take SATA drives, they were mounted in the DVD drive bays. Even though they were supposedly hot swappable the system never saw them as normal drives, it always treated them as removables. When I rebuilt my PC this year there was no room for drives so they went and I now have to use USB devices instead.
To be on the safe side I went through a couple of old drives that had been used on the NAS and plugged them directly into the PC motherboard and cleaned them with diskpart and then formatted them fresh. That seems to do it.
