cannot format windows

[gregje]

hi.
recently my pc became laggy as i hadnt formatted for a long time
i have 3 hard drives. i have a sata maxtor 160gb hard drive, an ata seagate 160gb hard drive and a 40gb ata. all my files that i backed up are on the ata hard drive so i just unconnected it and will use it when windows is working.
when i try to reformat my sata drive it gets an error saying that it might be damaged etc. i havent had it particularly long and dont know what could have happened to it... is there anything i can do to find out whats wrong with it.. preferably without windows in the bios, but if it has to be so, when theres windows on another hard drive.
then when i try to reformat with the 40gb hard drive, it starts up properly and detects it, starts the initial stages of the windows formatting where theres the partition selecting, does the percentage part and then needs to restart. when it restarts, if i have the cd in it tries doing the same process again, and if i dont it just freezes at the boot from cd section.
i dont know why its doing it... the ata is set as a master drive... ive tried it many times.. help would be much appreciated.

 

[Frank4d]

I have had some drives where the MBR was so trashed that no Windows utilities would fix it or even run. Solution was to download the drive manufacturer's "zero fill" utility and run it (sometimes incorrectly called a low level format).

I recommend if you try this that you remove all drives with data that you care about so there is no chance you can wipe the wrong drive.

 

[gregje]

thanks for the advice it has put me on the right track definately.is there any you could advise for specific hard drives.. i found a good one but it said it doesnt support nf4 chipsets.. which mine is.

 

[gregje]

found one and its worked thank you very much for your help much appreciated... i was getting withdrawal symptoms from not being able to play call of duty 2 .

 

[MonkeyX]

Many SATA drives also require drivers from the controler manufaturer at boot time. Check the motherboard/ pc maker's site. Download them and copy them to a floppy (make sure the disk doesn't have any bad sectors!) When Windows starts to install there should be a part where it says something about pressing F6 to load any extra drivers. Insert disk hit F6 and follow any prompts on screen. This should only be needed if you are using the SATA drive as the install drive for Windows (I think!)

As for the ATA drive being set for master it shouldn't make a difference. SATA drives are handled seperately. The BIOS on most systems should determine the boot order for the drives.