Hard Drive won't format....

[Junior_co]

Trying to format my hard drive.... it gets to 80% and then stops....

Any ideas?

[PCguy]

Would you mind sharing what kind of set up you have?

[Junior_co]

I will give you a quick rundown of what my set up was before all hell broke loose.

This is/was a home built system and is about 11 months old...
Windows XP
115 G Hard drive (1 of 2)
40 G Hard drive (2 of 2) This was a 2nd Physical HD used for back up purposes
1 G RAM
Video Card w/ dual output pushing 2 Monitors....

I had to uninstall Service Pack 2 because of some e-mail issues... all went well, and that fixed the problems I was having. After running AV software and Defraging and just cleaning up in general, and (like an idiot) I decided to give SP 2 another try....

In the middle of that 2nd install of SP2, a message popped up saying that "Access is denied) and then it said that it would uninstall what it had partially installed. About half way through the uninstall, the system rebooted. Then everytime the screen got to the WINDOWS XP (with the little 'working bar' beneath it....) it would reboot again.... Over and over and over....

Tried to boot in safe mode, the last known good profile... but it would just reboot before getting there...

So I tried to repair XP using the XP disk... l That failed miserably, so Since I have a back up on the smaller HD (which I physically removed so it couldn't get screwed up also...) I said screw it and tried to format the HD and start fresh....

But every time I try it stops at 80% and stays there....

I've tried formatting from a dos prompt, deleting the old Partition and setting up a new partition, I've even tried installing the HD into my old computer as a second hd and format it there.... all to no avail

Any thoughts, questions...

Junior

[liljim]

What brand is the hdd your trying to format?

[Junior_co]

MAXTOR

diamond max pluse
120G ATA/ 133 HDD

[PCguy]

The size of the drive might be driving you nuts. What I would do is boot from the XP CD. During the setup it will give you a chance to delete the partition and create a new one. Use that, opting to do an NTFS partition with quick formatting.

[Junior_co]

Tried doing that, and it seemed to format Quickly but then it wouldn't copy one of the files.... can't remember which one, but I will do so again and see what happens and then get back to ya....

tnks

junior

[liljim]

You can also try using
Note: PowerMax v 4.09 will not detect ATA or SATA hard disks connected to embedded or add in RAID controllers, NVIDIA Force 3, Force 4, VIA KT 600 and KT800 chipsets.

or if that doesnt get you anywhere you can use

[Junior_co]

Now it won't even boot off the cd.

It goes from:

Verifying DMI Pool Data......
Boot from CD:
Press any key to boot from CD....
NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart....


It wasn't doing this last night....

Junior

[Junior_co]

ITS WORKING!!!!! So far....

It has restarted, and is now on the Installing Windows.....

Don't know what happened but, I'll let it run and see what happens....

One question, Will just using the Quick format affect anything down the line...

I guess I'm not totally sure what the difference between a quick format and a full format is...

Thanks again for all the help, I'll be back if things take a turn for the worse...

Junior

[PCguy]

Good job. You should be fine. I could give you very detailed info on the difference between quick formatting and regular, but you wont ever notice the difference so it wont matter to you.

Enjoy your working pc and thanks for letting us know its working.