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I have two Hitachi XL2000 2TB external drives for nightly backups of a Windows 2003 server. BackupAssist recommends formatting the drives as NTFS, which was done with no problem when I purchased the drives 6 months ago.

Recently I had an issue where BackupAssist started rejecting one of the drives, "Cannot write to the media - possible hardware failure" and "Hardware not responding to commands." Since this was only affecting one of the drives, I sent the drive back to Hitachi for a warranty replacement.

I just received the replacement, which was recognized by the server without issue; but came from the factory formatted FAT32. When pointing BackupAssist to the new drive, it gave me "Warning: We recommend backing up to NTFS volumes only." When trying to format the drive with the Windows utility, the only choice listed is exFAT. What can I do to get this drive formatted NTFS?

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Open a command box: I will assume D: is the drive letter, but substitute the actual letter in the next command.

Type the following command:

convert D: /FS:NTFS

and hit enter

If that does not work, open the Disk Manager, delete the partition, and recreate it as a primary partition, and then format it.

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Gparted is another good tool to have on hand. – Joe Internet Jun 23 '11 at 17:28
@Joe Gparted is great, but you typically have to boot from the disc to utilize, no? Command line to the rescue! – Nick Jun 23 '11 at 18:58
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