Click Start menu, select Run and enter diskmgmt.msc
If it asks you to initialise the disk, make sure you select a Basic disk, as opposed to a Dynamic.
You need to find the disk with unallocated space. Right click on it and select "New Partition" and follow these steps, clicking "Next" to get move on at each stage.
1. Partition Wizard starts, just click next to move on
2. Select Primary Partition.
3. Enter the maximum size for the Partition Size
4. Choose assign a drive letter. I used F:
5. Select "Do not Format this partition"
6. There will be a dialog box, summarising all the previous stuff. Click Finish
Now you have a drive letter, this is what we will pass to the formatter
Now download a copy of
fat32format. Extract the single EXE file to somewhere suitable, like C:\. Click Start->Run and enter cmd. CD to the where you extracted the fat32format exe, e.g. by typing CD /D c:\
Now you're almost done.
Type this
fat32format f:
You should see this displayed
Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure (y/n)
Now when it says this, it really means it. If you format the boot sector, FATs and root directory will be filled with zeros. By typing pressing Y and hitting return, you're also absolving me of liability for whatever was on the disk before.
Assuming you don't bail out at this point you should see something like this -
Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure
(y/n) :y
Size : 250GB 488392002 sectors
512 Bytes Per Sector, Cluster size 32768 bytes
Volume ID is 1bdb:2c1d
32 Reserved Sectors, 59604 Sectors per FAT, 2 fats
7629261 Total clusters
7629260 Free Clusters
Formatting drive f:...
Clearing out 119304 sectors for Reserved sectors, fats and root cluster...
Wrote 61083648 bytes in 0.988463 seconds, 61796609.106193 bytes/sec
Initialising reserved sectors and FATs...
Done
This means that all has gone according to plan. It should take about 4 seconds per Terabyte to format the disk.
