My Western Digital Passport Portable 2.5" USB 2.0 external drive worked fine for its first year of use. Then I decided to format it to delete all the data. I did a full format, not a quick format. At the end of the formatting process, the following message appeared: "WINDOWS WAS UNABLE TO COMPLETE THE FORMAT." I have tried to format this drive with my system (Vista) using the Quick Format option and the regular-format option, each producing the above error message at the end of the process. I also tried to do a so-called "low-level format" using the Hard Disk Low-Level Format Tool 2.36 Build 1181. The low-level format completed, but then when I tried to use the drive my opsys told me that I had to format it first, and when I tried to format it following this low-level formatting I got the same error messages. I know the drive is okay because it is listed in Computer Management (Local) \ Storage \ Disk Management as "111.79 RAW Healthy (Primary Partition)", and when I checked the drive using Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows, a proprietary WD tool for checking their disks that I downloaded from their site, at checked out as "healthy". I want to know how I can format this drive.
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