HDD Won't Defrag

[muthabored]

Greetings!

I'm attempting to format a 40GB HDD in a Micron PC but it won't go past 0%. I've seen this before but it's been a while...what usually causes a HDD not to format (other than possible bad sectors or clusters?). PC is running Windows Me

 

[SYAR2003]

Not having a partition on it .
Partition it with FDISK first .
(make sure to select the right disk ..)

 

[muthabored]

The HDD is already partioned. Any other ideas?

 

[SYAR2003]

Hi !
If you try formatting from windows ,
try booting with a startup diskette and format from that.

 

[muthabored]

Actually,I'd rather not reformat the drive...I just want to defrag it and it won't go past 0%. I know there are other diagnostic programs that one could run on a hard drive but I was wondering if there was/is something within Windows that would cause the drive not to defrag.

 

[SYAR2003]

Well your first question was that you attempt to format the drive, and it stopped at 0% .

So is it formatted with FAT32 system or not .
Perhaps that was a typing error .

Anyway , a drive is useless without both a partition & a format of that partition .

If it's a drive in use maybe you need to run scandisk on it
and accept scandisk to fix faults it finds .

I know defraggers won't run if there is faults on the partition.

syar

 

[muthabored]

You're right...it was a typing error. I meant to say that I attempted to defrag the drive and it stopped at 0% and would go no further. Thanks.

 

[SYAR2003]

Boot into safe mode and do a thorough scandisk ,
se if that helps.

syar

 

[jbotz]

You may also need to disable any anti-virus software and also the Task Scheduler built in to Windows.