Ensure your drive has no partitions.
Open up Disk Management and ensure the Disk is unallocated.
Get device name. We'll need to this to select the device.
Open Command Prompt in Adminstrator mode and run this command:
wmic diskdrive get Caption,DeviceID,InterfaceType
You wil get a list of devices, likely the drive you are looking for is SCSI if you are using a USB enteral drive like WeMe.
Ensure your Disk number matches what is in Disk Management so you are trying to format the wrong drive.
Run the pfshell.exe in Command Prompt in Administrator Mode
Close out all of File Explorer and Disk Management just-in-case (So they aren't holding up the drive)
In pfshell select the device.
eg.
device \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE5
Format the drive by typing
initialize yes
While its formatting there should be no output occuring. When it completes you'll see a new line with the input character eg. #
If you are getting read/write bad, make sure you delete the volume in Disk Management to remove any lingering partition and try again.
If you go to disk management it will still say unallocated. That makes sense since Disk Management can't read a PS2 partitions
In pfshell with the device still selected you can see if it was succesfull by doing a list:
ls
You will see:
0x0001 128MB __mbr
0x0100 128MB __net
0x0100 256MB __system
0x0100 512MB __sysconf
0x0100 1024MB __common
We need to create a partition that we will store our games within.
If we are using a 2 TB drive that means we have 2,000,000 MB (2 million) and 1536 is already being used from the base install.
So we have 1,998,464 to work with.
I ended up using HDL Dump to copy games instead of creating a partition since its easier.
Check compatbility for HDL Loader for your game here: https://www.absoluteanime.com/hdloader/
If you see [Mode 3] is corresponds to Compatibility 3: Unhook Syscalls not the DMA Mode
https://www.psx-place.com/attachments/apa-partitioniology-2022-09-25-pdf.38591/