Recover Old WHS 2011 USB Backup Drive

[wjburl 0]

When I installed WHS 2011, I used an external USB drive that I already had for WHS to use as the backup. That's the one that does't show up on the list of drives in WHS 2011.. It is a 2TB, USB 3.0 drive. After a while I concluded that it was overkill and replaced it with a smaller one. I wanted to use that drive on a Win 7 system and the OS sees the drive, but when I click on it, I get a message that it is not accessible. How can I get make that drive usable on another system. I've tried other stand alone utilities such as DBAN and although it sees the drive, it won't let me select it. I haven't tried to remove it from the the enclosure to use it as an eSATA drive yet.

[diehard 42]

Since the drive is already in a USB enclosure, I would suggest booting your PC with a bootable version of gparted. Then select the drive and clean.

[jmwills 284]

Go into the Computer Mngt Applet>Disk Management and see if the drive shows as "offline". If so, bring it online and then format it.

 

Or use the diskpart utility from a Windows Command line.

[ikon 438]

I agree with diehard & jmwills. DBAN is great, but it won't remove the partitioning info on the drive, which is likely what's causing you problems. DiskPart and gparted are great for the job. You can get an easy-to-use version of gparted by downloading PartedMagic. It's free. You use the 'clean' option to basically return the drive back to factory condition.

[wjburl 0]

I just removed the partition with Disk Management, created a new volume and a quick format. That was easy. I also downloaded gparted to add to my stack of utility disks. I'll Check Parted Magic next. Thanks for the help!!!

[ImTheTypeOfGuy 54]

I have an SSD that was in raid 0 that has the same problem, except I can't get disk management to work. I will have to try gparted.

[jmwills 284]

DiskPart from the command line will do fine

[ImTheTypeOfGuy 54]

I will have to try that then as it would be easiest.