How to Reset a Seagate External Drive

By Joshua Laud

Updated September 28, 2017

Resetting an external hard drive frees up space and increases speed
i external hardrive image by Photoeyes from Fotolia.com

Hard drives can often begin to slow down, get full, or become corrupt. If you have a Seagate external hard drive that is slowing down, you can reset it to its original state. This process will remove all data, but the drive will run and respond much more quickly than it previously did. If you want to reset the Seagate external hard drive, then you can do so using the Windows operating system. Resetting a hard drive is different than resetting a blank CD or floppy disk, and requires you to use administrative settings.

Click "Start," "Control Panel," "System and Maintenance," then "Administrative Tools." Double-click "Computer Management" and enter your password to load the settings.

Click "Disk Management," then locate your Seagate external hard drive.

Right-click the drive and click "Format." Click "OK," if you want to reset the drive using the existing settings; you can choose to change the name of the drive. It is not recommended to reset the file format system as it will be set, by default, for your current operating system.

Click "OK" to begin the formatting process. Once a dialogue box displays "Finished," you will have reset your Seagate external hard drive.

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