Can't Format Drive,it's write protected ,HELP?

2341 Views 4 Replies 5 Participants Last post by t_russell, Mar 12, 2009

weatherphobia

Discussion Starter · Mar 12, 2009

I am using an Intel based Quad-core q9400 system, motherboard is ga-ep45-ud3p gigabyte.
OS is Vista Home Premium 64 bit

My main boot drive is a 320GB SATA 2 drive and works perfectly.

I decided to install an older IDE drive for backups etc, it is configured as master on the IDE channel and doesn't not conflict upon reboots or anything else..

Anyway, I cannot Format this IDE drive, it says it is write protected. I've checked the bios and jumpers and can't imagine what is preventing me from formating this drive.
It's a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L080P0 80GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA133 Hard Drive

Can one of you help?

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MRHANDS

· #2 · Mar 12, 2009

I had this similar problem on an 80 gig ide drive that i pulled from an old emachine. The only way I could format this drive, was through linux. After that, I could format through windows, no problem.

Make an iso boot disk of ubuntu or something and give it a shot.

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Arbiter419

· #3 · Mar 12, 2009

Yeah, give gparted a try.

It's fantastic, it'll do anything you could possibly want to do regarding partitioning, formatting, etc.

www.gparted.sourceforge.net

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ounderfla69

· #4 · Mar 12, 2009

I had that problem before with some of the restore partitions in disk management. I booted an XP or vista disk and deleted the partition. Have you tried Diskpart commands in a cmd window? That might work too.

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t_russell

· #5 · Mar 12, 2009

You can see if you can use disk management to delete the partition. Otherwise using an install disk is probably the easiest way.

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