Cant format my External hard drive to ntfs

I gave my Hard drive to a friend to use who later returned it to me that when he slotted it into his laptop's usb port, the Hard drive was not responding... I tried on my pc but it takes too long for it to be recognized... Yet when i try to format it all i get is windows was unable to complete the format.. So far i have done everything i know but no progress... Need the help of great minds here...

when installing windows on a machine, there is this option that pops up if you want to format the drive. Try formatting it by using the windows method. It should work.

Thanks for your suggestion.. I will give that a try and see how it goes.. But in the mean time am opened to other suggestions... Thanks

@chinesta10 have you tried it in a new or different case? try that if you haven't already don that. It is likely the problem is from the USB cable or the interface connector on the case itself. Try changing that and let's see.

Thanks for the suggestion.. I tried to open the case but at the moment i am finding it difficult to remove the hard disk from the case... It seem that the hard disk cannot be removed from the case....

what hard drive is it..? i mean what brand ... or what type of case is it in... such info may help.. as someone here may have come across to have is solved before.. upload pics if you can.. that will help as well

Better still, take a photo of it and let's see. It would make things much easier for all of us.

Had a similar problem sometime back with a 1.5TB seagate external. No matter what I did I could not format it. This was solved a year later when I had a chance to connect it directly in a desktop PC of a friend. I then formatted it using a DOS format tool on Hirens Boot CD and after about 30 mins it was fully formatted and worked okay when I placed it back in the external.

Obviously, my harddisk was the bigger type so had to be put in a desktop. But the method should be the same. Just find time to try it.

Thanks to you all for the suggestions... I tried tried some of the above suggestion but none worked... On the subject of trying to remove the drive from the casing, i just thought that somehow the drive is attached to the casing and maybe forcing to open could damage the hard disk for life....

And also about making a bootable drive and trying to format the drive using the windows installing procedure, it didnt work as the windows still coul not make the format option accessible when i choose the drive....

But after toiling with and trying out possible solutions over and over again, i finally got this simple stuff to work for me... I right clicked on my computer and selected manage and navigated to the disk management option.. There, i tried to shrink the volume and finally after being successful, i was able to format the new volume... I have now shrunk the drive into 4 partitions now and it is working perfectly for now...

Am observing what will happen as i continue to use it for a long time... I guess it might be a virus on the drive which is causing this windows cannot format problem.... But now after shrinking the existing volume into 4 parts, it seems the drive is working fine now...