Solution to "There has been a problem writing to the hard disk drive!" in WinHIIP

[Zc152]

Had a bit of a problem formatting a hard drive for HDLoader today. All attempts to write or otherwise modify the drive resulted in the error "There has been a problem writing to the hard disk drive!".

Though I did find some helpful tips on here and on Google, none of them solved the problem. As a result, some of this information will be borrowed from other posts. If you feel you deserve credit for this post, send me a PM with a link to your post and I will credit you at the bottom.

But first, a note that will help your odds of success if you experience this same problem.

- Connect your drive directly to a computer whenever possible. WinHIIP seems to have trouble with USB Enclosures and USB Converters.

And now to the guide.

If you haven't already, bookmark this link, shut down your computer and plug the drive into your PC, preferably via an IDE cable rather than a converter.

After your computer has rebooted, go to Computer Management. If you are running Windows Vista or 7, this can easily be done in the start menu with a simple search.

It may take a moment to load, but once loaded, you will see a window similar to this:



Double click Storage, then double click Disk Management.

After a short load, you should see something similar to this:



The Disk number may be different, but you should remember the number so you don't accidentally wipe the wrong drive.

Click OK.

Right click the tab on the left (circled in red) and click Initialize Disk or Online if the Disk initialized automatically. Then, Right click the Unallocated space on the disk (circled in green) and click New Simple Volume.



Proceed through the New Volume Wizard, setting the Volume size to the maximum disk space and formatting the drive under the NTFS file system. Check Perform a quick format as we will be doing a full format later.

Wait for the drive to finish formatting, then right click the healthy partition you just made and click Delete Volume.

Now, open WinHIIP and click Select Drive, then select your drive. Press OK to all errors that pop up upon loading the drive.

At this point you should be able to write to the drive with no problems. I suggest formatting the drive to your personal preferences before doing anything else.

Hopefully this will help anyone to come who has a similar problem to mine.

Also, first post. :P

[leech88]

You're a genius! it worked!