Hard Disk Reformatting FAT32

[MelD]

Hello - this is my first post so please forgive any indiscretions.
I have a 1tb USB Maxtor 9NZ2D8-500 drive that I purchased to back up a XIVA NAS.My OS is Win 7. A problem arose that the NAS would not recognise the drive because it requires FAT32 formatting. I've been through a numbers of forums for advice on reformatting its total capacity and tried all suggestions, including SwissKnife (which won't recognise Win 7). I was directed to HDDGURU.COM and tried HD Low Level Format Tool 2.36 Build 1181. That issued 'format error' messages for about 12 hours, but then reported 'format complete'. Now my computer will not recognise the drive at all!
Can anyone please help?

[fzabkar]

I don't know what the LLF tool did to your drive, but if it were working, you could have used Seagate's DiscWizard to create a full sized FAT32 partition:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/s ... NewLang=en

Can you see the USB enclosure with Microsoft's UVCView utility?

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_ID ... ew.x86.exe

Does the drive show up in Disc Management or Device Manager?

[MelD]

Hi, and thanks for getting back to me. Working from the bottom up,

1. Device Manager reports that it is a "USB Mass Storage Device" and that the Microsoft USB Driver is working correctly.

2. I am unfamiliar with MS UVCView utility.

I wish I'd known about Seagate's DiscWizard before all of this started!

[fzabkar]

ISTM that "low level format" is a misnomer. AFAIK, it hasn't been possible to LLF a hard drive since the introduction of IDE in the early 1990s. At least that's what the HD manufacturers tell us. Hard drives are LLFed at the factory. I think of a LLF as what happens when you prepare a magnetically blank floppy diskette.

I suspect that the program just zero-fills the hard drive. It has definitely zeroed your MBR and partition table, which means that you must go into Disc Management to initialise it. At the moment you should see a hard drive with 100% unallocated space.

I believe DiscWizard should be able to do all the above, if it can see your drive in the USB enclosure.

I notice that the program's description states that it "will erase, Low-Level Format and re-certify" a hard drive. If I've misunderstood, could someone please explain what the program really does? What does "re-certify" mean?

[MelD]

Thanks a million! DiscWizard just delivered me a FAT32 1tb function HDD (well, that's how it looks at this stage).
My gratitude to you and the forum!