Format a Harddrive

Hardware Hub Storage
1

Hi! i am completley new here and im not that skilled with computers, i have basic knowlege and i have built several computers myself. I have watched The Tek alot and thats why i came here to ask u guys. 

 

I was gonna turn on my pc one day, and it just kept on loading forever, i couldnt not even boot in safemode. so i figured it was something wrong with the OS. but i really didnt want to lose what i had on my harddrive, so i went out and bought a new one and installed win8.1. then i figured if i plugged that "broken" harddrive in as not a bootdrive i could boot my system. but i could not. so i have left it unplugged for a while and now i want more space again. so i thought maybe i could plug it in while my system was running and just open it up and erase everything on it. as soon as i clicked it in "my computer" my system froze again. and it was frozen until i just pulled the plug out again. 

So i was wondering if there was any way i could format it from the uefi. If u need any computer specs, tell me, and please say how i find them aswell:) Oh and my motherboard is MSI something, if that has anything to do with it.

I hope u are nice to me :D Thank you :D

2

you should never plug in internal devices while the computer is running.  why cant you just install the old HD then boot up on your new windows installation? does it not detect your old HD?

3

You're probably dealing with a dead or dying hard drive from the sounds of it.  If so, no amount of formatting will help you.  It's a mechanical problem.  It'd probably be a good idea to run some hard drive tests on it (if possible).  DFT, HDDScan, a manufacturer diagnostic (seatools, WDLifeguard etc).  Toss one on a flash drive, boot to it and see if you can run some tests on the drive.

If the drive is ok, and it really is a software issue (unlikely given the behavior you report), then there are tons of ways to format the drive without booting into windows.  The most simple for a novice is probably from the windows install disk.  Unplug your good drive (while plugging in the bad one), pop the disk in, go through the setup until you get to the option to format the drive, format it, then exit the install.  

4

you may fry your PSU if you try plugging it in when system is running

5

+1 good advice