How to format WD 3TB My Book Ext Hard Drive without Bloatware

[jonnyD]

I'm finally getting around to using a brand new WD 3TB My Book External HD. Is there a way to format it to NTFS (Windows 7 Pro 64-bit) without all the loaded bloatware?

[Salmon Trout]

You just plug the external drive into your computer, right click it in Windows Explorer, choose "Format" in the context menu, and select NTFS from the file system dropdown. That's all.

I don't know what you mean about "loaded bloatware". Perhaps you could explain? Do you mean pre-installed WD software? If you format the drive, that will all be gone.

[jonnyD]

Nope, just the loaded WD software. I mispoke.

[Salmon Trout]

Nope, just the loaded WD software. I mispoke.

You didn't misspeak, you are right to call it bloatware. First thing I do with a new external is to format it, to get all the space I paid for. I know some people may find a use for the preloaded stuff on external drives, but I would rather delete it.

[jonnyD]

So I just formatted per you instructions. The advertised 3TB drive shows only 1.81 usable terabytes!! It seems I've lost about 3/4 of a terabyte?!!

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]

[jonnyD]

Could it be this thing is mis-advertised and is actually a 2 TB drive?

[jonnyD]

Here's a photo of the box.

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]

[Salmon Trout]

Examine the disk in Disk Management and report back what you see. You may need to repartition it.

[patio]

It's a2 TB drive....1.8 is actually the size...give or take a few 100 Mg...


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[Lisa_maree]

A couple of things,

If you get a usb drive with software on it the easiest way to clear the drive, is to select all files and delete holding the shift key. Reformatting a 3 tb HD using the windows format will give the result you have 1.82 TB instead of 3 tb. Either you will need to set the drive up as a GPT partition type to get a full 3tb  or use the WD Drive utilities. Using GPT partitioning will limit you to only using the drive under windows 7 or later. The WD format is universal between Mac and PC .

[Salmon Trout]

Some machines cannot see more than 2 TB until you make a GPT partition.

[herostyle]

GPT is indeed needed and the above result is expected without a GPT partition.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2581408

Summary
In order for an operating system to fully support storage devices that have capacities that exceed 2 terabytes (2 TB, or 2 trillion bytes), the device must be initialized by using the GUID partition table (GPT) partitioning scheme. This scheme supports addressing of the full range of storage capacity. If the user intends to start the computer from one of these large disks, the system’s base firmware interface must use the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and not BIOS.

[patio]

The other option is to partition the HDD and then GPT wouldn't be necessary...

[jonnyD]

Well, as it turns out, I accidentally clicked on the incorrect HD icon and quick formatted the wrong HD. I thought I was formatting my new 3TB HD and it turns out I quick formatted my old HD -  So I thought everything just went, PFFFFFF!!!! all gone. But then a friend asked me if I only quick formatted and hadn't tried to write anything new to the drive, and I said yes, this was the case. So he took my HD home and did something to it to "retrieve" some of the files. He said it had something to do with the quick formatting process changing the directory to a bunch or zeroes or ones so that my computer would think the drive had been wiped out but in actuality the data was supposed to still be there.

I just looked at the "retrieved" HD and while there's some things I can access again (and almost all of the files names are gone so I'll have to rename everything, a gargantuan task), it seems quite a bit (I don't recall how many gigs of music and photos there were, but quite a lot) is not there.

So this all leads up to my question: is there a utility of some sort (now that I know this is possible) to get more of my files back - or is it probable that whatever my friend did to my drive may have precluded this possibility?

[Lisa_maree]

If your friend wrote the recovered data back to your old hard drive then there is unlikely anything more that can be done. Once data is written over deleted data that's it. To get a result like you had from the recovery suggests  the drive was formatted Fat 32. With NTFS format the file names and directories would have been recovered intact. Or the other option is that the recovery software  treated it as a Fat 32 drive.
I'm sorry that you didn't ask about possible recovery options  before your friend tried, there was a lot that could have been done to get all your data with complete directory/file names.