OK, this is for you youngsters who never used DOS hahaha.

I have a slave hdd in my desktop that's perfectly fine, but for some reason it locked up and I couldn't read from 2 of 3 partitions I had made. I couldn't format, delete, shrink - nothing. So basically I had a good but useless 1TB drive with about 150GB usable.

Now I'm a firm believer that Windows still has Dos in the background. Yeah, I know they say it doesn't, but they built the first Windows as a gui to run Dos.

OK, so click the start button and type in

cmd

for "command prompt" and see the cmd.exe link above it. Right-click on that .exe and choose "Run as Administrator."

Now look at the top of the "Dos" window that pops up and see that it is version 6.1.xxx. Hello? Dos 6.1?

OK, to totally clean a hdd in Dos, and it matters not the format because the format type is just software on the disk and this will erase everything - MBR, tables, everything including partitions which are also just software.

Your Dos window is open. At the command prompt type

diskpart

and hit enter. Wait a while until diskpart shows as the command prompt. Now this is going to be easy because most Dos commands are strange contractions or something, but this is real straight forward. When you see the diskpart prompt, type

list disk

and hit enter. It will show you all of your disks. You might be doing this to a USB external, but that's fine because you are in Windows with the USB drivers.

You can't hurt your %system% (C: ?) disk here because it just won't. So next type

select disk 2

and hit enter. If the disk you want is disk 3 or 4 because you have that many slaves, then use the letter number you need. It will be the same number as shows in "Disk Management." Be sure to get the correct disk because all is lost on it.

Now again type

list disk

and hit enter. The disk you selected will have an asterisk in front of it, verifying you have the disk you want selected. If the disk has partitions, they won't show. It will just show as a single hard disk, and its total size.

Now that you see that the disk is selected, at the prompt type

clean

and hit enter. Be patient. It might take 1/2 hour or so if it's really crapped out, but that drive will have nothing on it. Disk Management, found by typing that at the start button, will prompt you though everything to get it working again and formatted. So will a new install of Windows on it.

If you want a secure clean, instead of typing clean at the prompt, type

clean all

and hit enter. Expect it to take a couple of hours.

This will force a clean when format won't work, disk management won't work, the software that makes a disk a drive(s) is so corrupt those utilities won't work. It's also a secure wiper for free which will beat many other wipers by getting everything in all of the tables.

Cheers, you young hansum ma's.

Or you could boot into something like GParted Live and see if you can actually rescue it instead of just wiping it.

or you could use "wise Data Recovery" (free program)