Had a bit of a problem formatting a hard drive for HDLoader today. All
attempts to write or otherwise modify the drive resulted in the error
"There has been a problem writing to the hard disk drive!".
Though I did find some helpful tips on here and on Google, none of them
solved the problem. As a result, some of this information will be
borrowed from other posts. If you feel you deserve credit for this post,
send me a PM with a link to your post and I will credit you at the
bottom.
But first, a note that will help your odds of success if you experience this same problem.
- Connect your drive directly to a computer whenever possible. WinHIIP
seems to have trouble with USB Enclosures and USB Converters.
And now to the guide.
If you haven't already, bookmark this link, shut down your computer and
plug the drive into your PC, preferably via an IDE cable rather than a
converter.
After your computer has rebooted, go to
Computer Management. If you are running Windows Vista or 7, this can easily be done in the start
menu with a simple search.
It may take a moment to load, but once loaded, you will see a window similar to this:
Double click
Storage, then double click
Disk Management.
After a short load, you should see something similar to this:
The Disk number may be different, but you should remember the number so you don't accidentally wipe the wrong drive.
Click
OK.
Right click the tab on the left (circled in red) and click
Initialize Disk or
Online if the Disk initialized automatically. Then, Right click the Unallocated space on the disk (circled in green) and click
New Simple Volume.
Proceed through the
New Volume Wizard, setting the Volume size to the maximum disk space and formatting the drive under the NTFS file system. Check
Perform a quick format as we will be doing a full format later.
Wait for the drive to finish formatting, then right click the healthy partition you just made and click
Delete Volume.
Now, open WinHIIP and click
Select Drive, then select your drive. Press
OK to all errors that pop up upon loading the drive.
At this point you should be able to write to the drive with no problems.
I suggest formatting the drive to your personal preferences before
doing anything else.
Hopefully this will help anyone to come who has a similar problem to mine.