Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of ArtG2521
ArtG2521Flag for United States of America

asked on

Can't erase hard drive to virgin status

I bought a brand new Western Digital 3TB drive to format and load windows 7 Ultimate.  The short story is I made a mistake and now have two unallocated spaces. I did this within Win 7 using another computer.  One is fine and I can create a partition if I wish.  I did do this with Paragon Hard Disk Manager 14 but then when I went to create a partition from the second allocated space it will not allow me to do anything with the space.  I then deleted the "good" partition thinking that would solve the problem, but it did not.  See the two images attached.  You will see in the good allocated space (on left) the program will allow me to do anything I want to it.  The other unallocated space (on right) leaves me with no real options.  I can't delete, format, partition, resize, nothing at all.  I even opened it in Win 7 disk management and it is the same.  Both programs see the unallocated space but can do NOTHING about it! Other strange things I noticed during my "mistake".  Some warnings said the drive was not initialized, I also noticed the drive has no label name.  I admit my mistake, but all I want to do is bork the drive back to its' original virgin condition and start over.  I am a mid level experience guy on computers and have set up HDDs many times, but I have no clue what I did or how to fix it. Very frustrating.  Please help.  I want to do the easiest thing possible and be able to get back to virgin state and create one large partition to load Win 7 and then assuming it would be "normal"  I can simply go in and resize, create more partitions, just like I've always done.
Avatar of Tyler Verkade
Tyler Verkade

Personally, I'd get a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD, and boot into DBAN to run a quick disk wipe on the drive.

Download UBCD ISO: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Avatar of Eirman
In Win 7 disk management, you should see a right-click option to initialize (usually over on the left).
Then you should be able to delete partitions
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of rindi
rindi
Flag of Switzerland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
No need for the lengthy wipe process DBAN offers.
Connect it to any running Windows System xp or higher. Open an elevated command prompt, type
diskpart [press enter}
list disk
select disk x (if x is the number of the disk in question)
clean

That's all, back to virginity.
Avatar of ArtG2521

ASKER

Thanks, rindi, that worked.