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Question

Force-stopped file system check - system freezes on startup

Sep 2, 2017 9:46AM PDT

Hi there.

Recently, I installed a brand new 2Tb Seagate disk. I'm also running 2 other disks and an SSD system disk.

It was working fine, but I noticed that it had a small partition that I hadn't created myself, so I used Partition Wizard to try to merge it with the main partition.

Not sure how, but I think I somehow screwed up. After the merge, Windows (7) told me the disk needed reformatting. Instead of reformatting it, I went back to Partition Wizard to run a file-system check and repair.

The check and repair was literally taking hours. Since all the files on that disk had already been backed up, I just decided to force the computer to restart with the intention to just reformat the disk after restart.

Didn't work. Now, when that disk is connected up, the computer won't even get past the BIOS screen. It just freezes at the BIOS splash screen.

When I start up the computer with the new disk unplugged, the computer works fine. But if I get the computer running and then plug in the new disk, there's no indication anywhere that the disk is there.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Restore from backup.
Sep 2, 2017 10:38AM PDT

Windows does create small partitions on install so if you tamper with them you get to restore from backup or start over. This is not a bug.

You may have to perform a disk wipe to that drive on a more cooperative PC if you can't find a way in the bios to only boot from say a specific drive or USB.

I use USB bootable versions of Linux to do such work.

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Answer
Disk
Sep 2, 2017 6:45PM PDT

I don't know what tools you have.
I keep a bootable copy of partition wizard, runs under linux.
Boot it up and navigate to that disk and delete all the partitions.
Now you should be able to partition and format as you like.

Not something I've tried but I see aomei also has a bootable partition tool.