I have a 2TB USB drive that somehow ended up in RAW format. Windows can’t seem to read it. I had never heard of this until now and have not been able to find a way to convert it to NTFS without reformatting. So I’m reformatting. No important data is being lost, I’ve recovered what I need.
I used Windows Disk Manager to create a partition and then format. The format has been running for about 24 hours. Task Manager shows that disk at 100% utilization constantly.
This does not seem normal.
Does this suggest it’s a bad disk? I used EaseUSRecover and it was able to view the files on the disk.
If you’re on USB 2.0, the time sounds about right. If possible use a USB 3.0 or 3.1 connection, though your drive is old and may not support it. Full formatting a drive requires writing and reading to every sector of the drive and takes longer if there are bad sectors as the format tries to recover them numerous times before moving on. A quick format just writes over the File Allocation Table (FAT) and is much quicker.
A couple of things to try / do.
Do a quick format of the drive and run Crystaldiskinfo. If any of the buttons are yellow or red, the drive is highly likely bad and should be tossed because it may completely fail at any time.
However, there is a high probability (given the drive was suddenly not recognized) that the USB interface failed. I’ve said it many times on other forums that he USB interface and the power bricks on external drives (other than third party enclosures) are cheap, cheap, cheap and prone to guaranteed failure. Remove the drive from the case (it’s long out of warranty) and connect it directly inside your PC or if you can’t do that (e.g. if you have a laptop), get a SATA to USB cable or USB dock and run Crystaldiskinfo again. It probably won’t pass all the tests, but at least you’ve eliminated the cheap USB interface.
If you have a spare USB drive lying around (doesn’t have to be big), put a GParted LiveUSB on it. Windows and Mac sometimes have issues with weird formats. It boots to a Linux environment, in there open the utility and kill and reformat the drive, put exFAT or FAT32 on there.
USB still doesn’t describe much. USB 3.x (either “SS” logo on it or blue plastic) is much, much faster than 2.x. But I don’t think 24 hours is even normal on 2.x
When I tried to do a full format of a 2TB USB drive, it told me it was going to take 24 house, too. A full format has to check every sector for bad blocks. A quick format just assumes everything is okay.
A format might take this long if somehow you have checked, or it is enabled by default, “surface test” or “check all sectors”, some similar language. A simple format should take a minute or two. Disk needs checking with a 3rd party app, I reckon.