I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that a local guy gave me two HDD cases-boxes-holders(?). You put drives into them, and connect them to your computer. I have a 2-drive LaCie and a 4-drive Buffalo. One of the drives is driving me crazy. It's a 3TB HGST. When I connect it, the computer beeps. It shows up as Disk E, but when I try to access it, I get , "E is not accessible. The request failed due to a fatal hardware error."

I used Disk Manager, and it sees a 3TB drive, "not initialized, unallocated," and it began formatting it. No good. It started but stopped because of a problem. Using Diskpart, I began formatting it, but it stopped because of "an incorrect parameter."

I don't like to give up on things, but this seems to be a dead end. The computer can see and access the drive, but that's as far as it gets. I could buy another one for $35, but I'd be willing to spend (waste) all day playing around with this one.
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I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that a local guy gave me two HDD cases-boxes-holders(?). You put drives into them, and connect them to your computer. I have a 2-drive LaCie and a 4-drive Buffalo. One of the drives is driving me crazy. It's a 3TB HGST. When I connect it, the computer beeps. It shows up as Disk E, but when I try to access it, I get , "E is not accessible. The request failed due to a fatal hardware error."

I used Disk Manager, and it sees a 3TB drive, "not initialized, unallocated," and it began formatting it. No good. It started but stopped because of a problem. Using Diskpart, I began formatting it, but it stopped because of "an incorrect parameter."

I don't like to give up on things, but this seems to be a dead end. The computer can see and access the drive, but that's as far as it gets. I could buy another one for $35, but I'd be willing to spend (waste) all day playing around with this one.

I looked online for solutions, but nothing has worked. I'd appreciate any suggestions, but this is probably waiting to be disassembled so I can maybe use the parts for something else. These drives have great magnets. : )

Jerry,

Did you try this procedure? It may work for you.

1. Tap the Search button on the taskbar and type “cmd” in the search box. Right-click “cmd” and select “Run as administrator”.

2. Type diskpart and press Enter.

3. Type list disk and press Enter.

4. Type select disk # (ex: disk 1) to select the external hard drive to be formatted and press Enter. You may get indication from the size of the disk.

5. Type clean to remove all information on the external hard drive.

6. Type create partition primary to create a partition.

7. Type format fs=ntfs label=# (ex: label=new)quick to format the partition as NTFS.

8. Type assign letter=# (ex: letter=F) to assign a drive letter.

9. Double type exit to exit Diskpart and Command Prompt successively.

Daryl