Format Failed - Cannot Access Hard Drive Now - HELP!

Hi guys,

I tried to full format an external hard drive and I accidentally unplugged it before it finished. Then I tried to full format it again and about 30% of the way through, an error message appeared saying the format failed. Now my computer cannot access the drive in "my computer", disk management says it cannot initialize it because "The media is write protected," and I tried diskpart to fix this it gives me nothing but errors. I tried this:

DISKPART> list disk
DISKPART> select disk (id)
DISKPART> online disk (if the disk is not online)
DISKPART> attributes disk clear readonly

It give me this error message "DiskPart failed to clear disk attributes."

It shows the disk is online. It has no volume so Diskpart says I cannot format it. It won't let me create a volume either because it says it is "write protected."

I also tried some method of accessing the registry as suggested on another forum but the key I needed to fix “Storage Device Policies” wasn't in my registry on either of my laptops.

What do I do?????

 

You could try to fully wipe the disk from scratch and start over.

I use a Linux boot disk and dd for this. Be careful with dd tho as if you use it wrong you could wipe the wrong drive or cause serious data damage.

 

You also can go to the drive manufacturers site most all have a down loadable program to write 0's to the drive retuning to factory state.