Imagine, for a moment, that I have a 1TB hard drive that has not been formatted. I want to format it with NTFS. Normally, I'd use a Windows disk for this purpose, but I don't have one of those handy. I do, however, have an 8 GB USB stick. I tried installing Fedora on the USB stick, booting off of it, and using it to format the terabyte drive, but it's being spazzy and retarded and uncooperative, and now there are five partitions on this drive and NONE of them are NTFS. I'm willing to play with Ubuntu again, but I'm pretty sure that the last time I did, it didn't even HAVE an NTFS option. What are my options? Mod Edit ~ Title and OP/Rule 9/Circumventing profanity filter
Try the GParted live CD. You can make NTFS partitions with no data loss and do much more -- all through a GUI. It's free to use.
Holy Jesus is that really the only option? The download page has like twenty things to click on, and three of the four methods of creating a USB live whatever in Windows require downloading even MORE stuff. And what's the difference between "GParted" and "GParted Live"? MY BRAIN BURNT. NEED SIMPLE FIX.
GParted Live allows you to boot to that disk rather than your hard drive when your computer starts up. I am sure you can put it on your thumb drive instead, but it may be easier to burn it to a CD. There are many other options out there but this is the first one that came to mind. Parted Magic supposedly runs from a USB drive.
This may sound silly but did you change your BIOS settings to to boot from your thumbdrive or disk drive?
You just want to format the drive and you do not have a cute little Dynex hard drive enclosure? You said in windows in that post #3, so what Windows do you have? And why would you need a windows disk to format a drive for Windows with Windows? Maybe if we knew what equipment you have and operating system(s) running we could better understand the objective and limitations.
Oh, and the Ubuntu live CD (which I assume you have) does have the option of formatting for NTFS. Just do not run the install icon on the live desktop, the gparted in on there and can be run separately.
Good news: I successfully formatted the new drive. Bad news: while I was moving files from the old drive to the new one, the old one died. 30 GB of information went down with it Windows XP was installed on an old 74GB Raptor drive. I needed to format my shiny new 1TB drive.
you could not format it with Windows XP? when you say the hard drive is bad, do you mean you can't boot from it anymore? ...
Depending upon what is meant by died, it might be recoverable with money if it was worth anything. http://www.ehow.com/how_7260806_mirror-drive-backup-xp.html
There are a number of free (as in free beer) Linux apps that can recover data. Some are better than others so it's a bit hit and miss but check reviews for some opinions. You might be able to mount them on a usb stick and then use it on the old drive.
I can't even burn Xubuntu's ISO to a dvd-rom, on two different computers. It's really amazing how buggy linux stuff is.
If it is mountable and not some chip or something that went bad, and I would not even try this (and never have): http://www.ehow.com/how_7377540_change-platters-hard-drive.html
Others mentioned a few good ideas, though they can be expensive and/or time consuming. You didn't give any details as to what the issue was with your old drive, but it sounds like a hardware issue. You are unable to physically read anything from the drive, right? If so, you could try this old PC repair trick... Wrap the drive in a couple paper towels, then stick it in a zip-lock bag. Place the drive (in the bag) in your freezer for a few hours. When it's good and cold, hook it back up and try to recover more data. I know it sounds silly, but sometimes it works (depends on what's causing the problem). If it does, it may not continue working for long, so copy the most important data first. If it dies again before you finish, try freezing it again. You probably won't be able to do it too many times, but you'll end up throwing it out anyway, so it's worth a shot.
Yep, I find that open source software is generally in a state resembling a perpetual alpha or beta test. The software may be free, but it's often too buggy or lacking in features to be a viable replacement for commercial offerings, especially long-term. I've had Linux distros installed on Intel and PowerPC platforms, and have even dabbled in FreeBSD and Solaris, but none of these can properly replace Windows or Mac OS for all purposes. I mean, having a system quit booting because I tried to install a proprietary video driver, or even for some less obvious reason, is just not tolerable when I need my system for work as well as play.
