Hard Drive Stops Formatting

[jereece]

I have a 6 Gig hard drive. I laid down a new single primary partition using fdisk. I rebooted per the instructions on the screen, then started formatting the hard drive. The format progresses fine until it gets to 68%, then it just stops. No noises from the drive, no error messages, no nothing. It just stops at 68%. I have retried several times. I even removed and laid down the partition again. It still stops formatting at 68%. This drive worked find prior to this.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks
jereece

 

[malden]

It sounds like your drive is bad. Can you mount the drive in a working machine and try to format it from within windows? That might give you more information about the drive.

I would mount the drive in a win2k box and run some diagnostic's on it.

Hope that helps.

 

[nightowl17]

Bad clusters will cause the problem that you state.the suggestion malden gave is good you might try running scan disk and see if it comes up with . Might just confirm malden suspicion

 

[prajapat]

Just try low level format. If you don't have appropriate utility, go to the manufacturer site and download Disk Manager. Run and make the boot floppy as per instructions and then choose low level format from Advance Diagnostic/Tools.

Atleast with Seagate Disk Manager, there is a low level utility Called SEAMAP.EXE, found on its boot disk, which can do the job but it need extreme level of expertese as little help is there. It can be run from bootable floppy in DOS mode. Just disconnect all other HDD before using this utility as a safety precaution.
Also visit Ontrack website for more infomation.

 

[jereece]

I finally got this solved. I don't understand it, but I let it stay formatting over night and well into the next day. When I checked it (after some 18 hours), it had finished formatting. For some reason it kept stopping, at least I thought, or slowed down a lot. But it finally finished formatting and after installing the OS is now working fine.

Thanks for all the suggestions however. I will keep them in mind next time.

Thanks,
Jim

 

[lgebhart]

jereece,

I am glad it has worked out for you, but I worry about the integrity of the drive to hold valuable data.

nightowl17's comments are good ones and so were prajapat's.

It should not take 18 hours to format any good 6GB drive and I would bet you have some bad sectors.

It still wouldn't be a bad idea to download a diagnostic program from the hard drive manufacturer's site to make sure your data is safe by running the non-destructive tests it provides for the hard drive.

I only make this suggestion because I know how horrible it is to lose information on a hard drive. ggebhart@clover.net
I hope I never get too old or arrogant to learn something new!