Format a data drive's Partition Table?

[’m‚³‚ñ]

I have a drive with a busted SATA connector that is still usable. The cable on the drive went bad, so I replaced the cable, and the drive is usable again.

However, the data on the drive was corrupted due to the cable being fubar. Nothing was left on the drive anyway that I needed, so I deleted the partitions, and formatted it.

I would like to know how to completely format the entire drive including the partition table, and start anew? If there was corrupted data on the drive, it's reasonable to assume the partition table on the drive also was corrupted.

I CANNOT use DBAN, I DO NOT have a DVD burner hooked up to my machine. My harddrives are running in an external enclosure, and I've pulled the monitor off the enclosure, opened it up, fiddled with it, put the enclosure back together, put hte monitor back on, and hooked it abck up SO MANY TIMES now I am NOT willing to pull it apart again. On top of that, my DVD burner won't fit in the enclosure anyway, and my computer no longer has a drive cage in it for a DVD or HDD to fit in anyway. So, short of doing an hour of work just to put a stupid drive in and wipe a drive, is there any other program I can run from inside of Windows to do this instead?

 

[NoxTek]

Sure, use Diskpart.

1. With the drive connected reboot the machine.
2. Open an elevated command prompt (cmd w/ admin privelidges).
3. Type 'diskpart' and hit enter.
4. You should now be running dispart, Microsoft's command line disk tool. type 'LIST DISK' and hit enter. You should get a list of all HDDs connected to the machine connected via SATA, PATA, or even USB. Look at the results and figure out which disk number corresponds to the drive you wish to clean up.
5. Type 'SELECT DISK #' where # is the number of the drive you want to clean and hit ENTER. The tool should return a message like 'Disk # is now selected'.
6. Type 'CLEAN' and hit ENTER. After a few seconds the tool will report that the drive has been cleaned.

At this point the partition tables on the drive have been completely cleaned and you can actually type EXIT to exit diskpart, and then you can open the standard Windows disk management console to create a new partition (or partitions), format them, etc. Or you can do this quickly by staying inside diskpart and typing these commands:

CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
SELECT PARTITION 1
FORMAT FS=NTFS QUICK

That will create a new partition, select it, and then format it with the NTFS filesystem. Once completed you can type EXIT and close all command prompt windows, and you're drive should be ready to use.

 

[’m‚³‚ñ]

Ahhh, thanks a bunch.

 

[BinarySynapse]

there is no formatting a partition table. It's only 64 bytes and every time you delete a partition, it's entry (there's four total) is zeroed out. When you delete all partitions, there is nothing left to indicate that the drive ever had any data unless you do a sector by sector scan to look for the remnants of the file system. An OS is never going to know any of your old data is left on the drive, and that old data will have no affect on new data.

 

[’m‚³‚ñ]

there is no formatting a partition table. It's only 64 bytes and every time you delete a partition, it's entry (there's four total) is zeroed out. When you delete all partitions, there is nothing left to indicate that the drive ever had any data unless you do a sector by sector scan to look for the remnants of the file system. An OS is never going to know any of your old data is left on the drive, and that old data will have no affect on new data.

This has nothing to do with data being there. It has to do with the 'bad sector' data, and other things stored in the partition table.

I used the instructions provided in post #2 and it worked just fine, and am doing a full format of the drive right now.

 

[BinarySynapse]

This has nothing to do with data being there. It has to do with the 'bad sector' data, and other things stored in the partition table.

I used the instructions provided in post #2 and it worked just fine, and am doing a full format of the drive right now.

There is no bad sector data in the partition table. The only thing that the partition table holds is where a partition starts, stops, it's type, and whether it's bootable. You said you had already deleted the partitions and created a new filesystem. What Blue Falcon told you to do was the exact same thing you had already done.

Bad sector data is only kept track of in the filesystem that no longer exists (when you create a new one, the old data is wiped), or it's stored in the drive hardware itself, in which case there is no way to clear it.