I bought a Seagate FreeAgent Desk external drive which admittedly said for Mac’s but I was told it would work with Windows by the sales clerk. Of course it would I thought and so bought it.
I just got it home and plugged it in. No pop-up appeared. Hmm that’s odd – perhaps they have gone back to the old unformatted drives I thought so I went to Disk Manager and checked it. Sure enough there was the drive but it had a small label saying it was Healthy (GPT Protected) and I couldn’t do anything. No deleting the partition, formatting or anything. Everything was grayed out.
After a quick search I found a neat tool that comes with Windows called Diskpart. So here’s what I did;
- Ran from a command prompt the tool “Diskpart“
- When in Diskpart you want to list the drives to type “list disk“.
- For me it came up with two disks. Disk 0 and Disk 2.
- I typed in “select disk 2“.
- it came back to me saying disk 2 had been selected. Great.
- Then I typed in “clean“.
- It confirmed it has succeeded in cleaning the disk and after I that I swapped back to Disk Manager and there was my disk all ready for a new partition to be created and formatted.
Et voila.
