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I was using Windows 10 to format an external USB 3 1tB drive, and it failed half way through (the message was only "format failed" - nothing meaningful).

I had been able to access the drive just fine until trying to format it. Now neither Windows' Disk Manager, not MiniTools Partition Wizard. Can even see the drive. The light is still on & when I hold it to my ear it seems to be spinning.

Is there any way to rescue the drive?

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I would try the following steps (in this order, until one succeeds or all have failed):

1) Completely turn off the external drive and the PC and turn them on again. If the drive does not have a real power switch, unplug its power supply and plug it in again.

2) Unplug the USB cable at the PC side and plug it in into another USB port.

3) Use another USB cable.

4) Replace the power supply of the external drive (perhaps a friend can borrow you an appropriate one); if this is not possible, at least measure the output voltage and compare to specification.

5) Connect the external drive to another PC.

6) Dismount the housing of the external drive and connect its HDD directly to the PC.

If all steps fail, including the last one, probably the HDD in the external drive is defective. If all steps but the last one fail, the housing of the HDD or the electronics which translate from USB to SATA (or whatever the HDD's connector is) might be defective.

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  • Connecting it to another PC did the trick :-) Dec 23, 2018 at 10:54
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    Glad that it worked, but please allow me to give an additional advice: Chances are that the electronics in the housing or the HDD itself have degraded, so you eventually should observe the behavior of that external drive very closely. If it would have been the cable, the power supply or the housing, that would be unambiguous. But now that it works with one PC, but not the other one, I wouldn't trust it any more and would replace it.
    – Binarus
    Dec 23, 2018 at 11:15

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