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Second Hard drive willnot format

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rigsby

Technical User
Sep 23, 2002
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Have a PC running XP home edition.

Stuck in a new hard drive, all set fine XP sees it allows me to partition and assign letter but when I try to format it keeps saying Format unsuccessfull.

Help!!
 
Hesitate to suggest this - but you could try booting machine from a win98 boot floppy and use fdisk/format to create/format partition (obviously fat32) - just to see if disk will format (if it will, see if XP will then read it).
Might be best to disconnect your main drive if you do this, just to make sure you are working on the right one.

Also, you could download utility from drive manufacturer's site to check integrity of drive.
 
Cheers wolf - in the end I decided to take the f'king thing hgome - stuck it in my pc and lo formats first time no problems - I have no idea why this is!

Stuck it back in other pC and all works fine - I am mystified, ther eyou go bloody Xp I s'pose.

 
Possibly it might have been this?


To initialize new disks. (From Help and Support)

Open Computer Management (Local).
In the console tree, click Disk Management.

Navigate to -
Computer Management (Local) / Storage / Disk Management

Right-click the disk you want to initialize, and then click Initialize Disk.
In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select the disk(s) to initialize.
If you are running Windows XP 64-Bit Edition, you can select whether to use the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) partition style.

The disk is initialized as a basic disk.

Notes

To open Computer Management, click Start, point to Settings, and then click Control Panel.

Double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.
You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings may also prevent you from completing this procedure.
New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it. If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk.

 
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