Hard Drive can not be formatted. The scale stays at 0%.

[AB777]

I am building a new system. I have a P4 2.4Ghz processor and Seagate 40G 7200-RPM hard drive. I installed Windows XP on it for the first time but the system was working slowly and sometimes it took me 10-15 seconds to open an application. It seemed it was going to freeze. I suspected something wrong and then decided to reformat my HD and install Windows XP again. I deleted partitions and then tried to reformat my HD again but formatting was still at 0% after I waited for 20 minutes. Then I decided to do a "Quick Format" which was completed very fast but when I tried to install Windows XP I started to get a bunch of errors saying that .sys files can't be loaded (probably because the HD is not formatted ). Then I brought my BIOS settings to defaults still no help. I think the problem either with CPU or HARD DISK. I decided to make 2 quality test. I have a second computer, which runs perfectly so I switched hard drives.

I removed unformatted hard drive from my new computer and installed it in a working computer and tried to format again. I could not do it. I was still getting the same problem with formatting scale staying at 0% on my old computer. So after that test I was sure that I have a Hard Drive problem. But that wasn't the case.

I decided to make a second test I install my working Hard Drive from old computer to the new system and see if I can run a Windows XP on a partition that haven't been used yet. When I installed my old working hard drive in a new computer the BIOS could not even detect it and I was getting strange errors saying that no Hardware can be detected at all even my CD-ROM or DVD drive which were detected perfectly before I switched hard drives. I checked my IDE cables and master - slave jumpers couple of times. They were set correctly. I even changed my IDE cables and installed new ones. Now I am suspecting that CPU is malfunctioning or something wrong with Mother Board or Mother Board's BIOS.

I am confused now. Will perform more test today. I would really appreciate assistance if anybody have any suggestions or knows how to solve the problem I have with my new computer.

 

[wolluf]

I'd tend to agree with your diagnosis.

One thing I'd try - slow down the CPU (you should be able to do this in the bios/on the mobo) - eg, try running it at 2.2 if you can.

 

[TekTippy4U]

Ab777...
just a few quick thoughts....maybe a virus....and/or maybe BIOS anti-virus settings....

TT4U

Notification:
These are just "my" thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions....I try very hard to impart correct info at all times.

 

[rclarke250]

Go to IBM.com do a search for drive fitness tools,make the diskette, and run standard test not the quick test. Most likely the drive will fail with slow performance,I have seen this 3 times in the last 6 months on seagate drives. As for the system board....take off everything but known good hard drive,set as master, video card,cpu,mem. hook up monitor,keyboard and mouse. then try the hard drive in both the primary and secondary ide slots. What does the bios see. try setting to default,and also use the clear jumber,or remove the battery (note this could take several hours to clear. Had an ASUS board A7V133-c took 4 hours to clear cmos with no battery.) If the bios won't see the drive then you have a damaged motherboard. But the CPU should be OK. Rich

 

[oasisgjm]

Try going to

http://www.mindbeat.com

and downloading their hard drive benchmark program. This will give you an indication of your hard drive transfer speed. Low readings could indicate a problem with your mainboard drivers; DMA mode; or a problem with the eide slot. All of which happened to me with the main symptom that it took ages to start an application.

 

[SkylineGTR]

dunno if this will help, but the problem he mentioned about "installing xp the first time and had things running too slow"... that happened to me as well and yes i thot the same as him and installed it twice.. howeverrrr
i dint hav a problem with my drive, althoo i thot it was justtt like him, so i went ahead and did the maxtor drive fitness, formatted, and any other thing possible, with every test coming out fine...

first off, my problem was that after installing xp, i could get to the XP splash screen, but then it would crash with the blue screen showing sum errors...

thus ma attention was drawn to the new motherboard and cpu i had bought as well as pc2700 ram.. so im no computer engineer nor did i hav any idea wat to do b4 calling tech help.. so i thot i shud playyyyy around in the bios..(even tho everything was at the appropriate settings)
altho im not sure of everything in there i can get a dim idea of wat each option was for.. first thing i made sure to get right was the cpu and ram frequency.. surely enuff they were right.. so i went ahead and changed wat seemed like useless lil options - one being something along the lines of "cpu virus protection"... i disabled this and prestoo! i could now get into the loginscreen..
butttttt it was moving farrrr to slow
by the time i hit enter and thing were processing at 1 micrometer per hour, the system jus rebooted magically by itself.. so i thot whyyyyyyyy ooo whyy
went bak into the bios... changed the cpu speed of my athlonxp 2600+(barton) from the appropriate 333 to 266 resultant frequenciez... this time xp was still running super mega slow, but it dint reboot...
so i went into bios again and changed the pc2700 ram from the 333mhz its spozed to be down to 266mhz... things ran fine now... i still wasnt happy cuz i dint pay for 266mhz
went bak and left the ram the way it was and put the cpu bak to 333mhz...
eeevvvvvvvver since then, i havnt been able to run my ram at the proper frequency (333mhz)...

Whyyyyyyy??
everytiem i try to go bak into bios to increase the ram frequency to 100%, the system boots up to winXp desktop.. things start to load.. and a few seconds later it jus reboots by itself.. at 80% it runs just fine...
(i dint pay for 80% of it and i dunno the difference in speed since it dunn work)

altho this might anser his problem, i have one too...
Pleeeeeease helpp ?

my set up is
AthlonXP 2600+
XFX NF2SALH mobo
Ultra 256mb PC2700 ram
WinXP sp1

 

[paparazi]

SkylineGTR
Is the heatsink fitted correctly and with paste? I have seen a couple of systems that would run underclocked but not at the correct speed (the extra heat created when running at full speed would result in a reboot)
Otherwise either the ram or the CPU are suspect (again, an incorrectly fitted AMD CPU which has been heat damaged) will often run OK at a reduced clock speed.
Martin

Start by questioning and soon you will be answering.
So please take but remember to return and give when you can.

 

[HippyWarlock]

I had a similiar prob a while back. Turned out there where bad sectors on the drive. The only way round it that I could figure (and why Format didn't flag the bad sectors scared me) was to guess at the location of the bad sectors, Create partitions around them, swap the partitions until I had a C: partition big enough to install onto and .... well, install.

Do you have any low level formatting utilities?

Oh and for an odd reason I had to format in FAT32. You can convert to NTFS later after install.

HTH - Peace

hmmmm? Heat damaged AMD? Must have hit 110degrees <VBEG>

Signatures reduce bandwidth

 

[SkylineGTR]

Well my heatsink and fan are the heavy duty combo that was recommended, and its pretty loud if thats any indication.. they look as tho their mounted pretty fine.. unless there are specific lil things in mounting it? i dunno.. otherwise they're fitted snug and dont move around...

in the nvidia and aida system utilities the ram is detected as pc2700 and i even remember having the system boot at 100% ram frequency enough to do a test of the ram on the aida program... it rebooted right away thereafter tho...

so does anyone know, generally, wat the rebooting is from??
Paparazi gave me an indication that its usually from overheating?? could it also be crappy ram tho even tho it was detected fine??

im not sure why there would be heating problems if the heatsink and fan are fitted fine....
plz helppp

 

[rreinman]

Hello,
boy did I ever have the same thing!!!
I am about to change from an Asus A7V 266e to a Soyo KT600 Dragon Plus v1.0.
The ram, and or the north bridge chip set seems to be having problems.
First: Asus has some problems with the via chip set on my particular board and it took 2 1/2 years to find out. I finally got money to install the 3rd stick of 512 DDR 333 ram and it never ran with the 3rd stick. Turns out that the chip set had problems when 3 sticks are used. That was one problem.
Second: I had not the exact ram installed and ran the Microsoft memtest-86 v3.0 found at:

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

It reported fine in even the extreme tests. Your board may not always boot up with value ram as I tried.
Also, if you have trouble formatting a drive, I always use HD kill utility from Microsoft that FORCES the drive to clean.
Hope this helps you out.
Let me know....
Bob