Question Windows froze while creating partition on new drive. Should I restart?

Jun 1, 2022
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I got a new 2 TB hard drive and I used the wizard in drive management to format and partition it. Minutes later, Windows Explorer completely froze and refused to terminate / restart. I tried to restart the computer but it says that Management Console is preventing the computer from restarting. But when I press cancel nothing happens. The system is completely non-responsive, except I can still press Force Restart and it gives me a confirmation which I have not yet accepted. So it's stuck on that "programs need to close" screen, and my only options are to 1. Wait for a miracle, 2. Force Restart, or 3. Hard reboot on the tower.


Can I safely reboot without killing my new drive? Or should I just wait a few hours and see if it voluntarily restarts after completing the format / partition operation it's presumably still doing?


I really don't know what's going on or what to do. Please help. Thank you.
 

Etrius vanRandr

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May 11, 2022
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I got a new 2 TB hard drive and I used the wizard in drive management to format and partition it. Minutes later, Windows Explorer completely froze and refused to terminate / restart.

That usually means the HDD is bad in some way, either the cable to the computer, or some other issue. I've only had nonresponsive windows from partitioning on bad disks or bad cables.

Can I safely reboot without killing my new drive?

Yes

I really don't know what's going on or what to do. Please help. Thank you.

Try out GParted Live, it's a super basic Linux ISO with the GParted software pre-installed. If that freezes too, something about your setup is bad.
 
Jun 1, 2022
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Hello. I managed to use g parted and it worked. Took a little bit of messing around in device and drive management. How do I know if the drive is bad though?

Thank you