Format C: took forever!

[SkylineChiliMan]

Yesterday after unsucessfully trying to fix my girlfriend's Compaq Presario 2100, I decided that it was time to format the hard drive and reinstall windows. At first I tried a quick format via the windows install cd, and that failed. So I tried the slow format. The slow format didn't give me any errors but it seriously took 20 hours to format a 30 gigabyte hard drive. I have never seen a format take so long, I have a 200 gb hard drive on my system, and it takes a fraction of the time to format. Can anyone tell me why this would happen?

 

[FlyingPenguin]

I would suspect either the drive is bad, or you have a bad connection. Unplug and reconnect the ribbon on the drive (both at the drive end and the mobo end). Corrosion can build up on the contacts and reinserting the connector will clean them. If you have a spare ribbon it wouldn't hurt to replace it.

Then download the hard drive manufacturer's drive diagnostic utility from their website and run the full (advanced) diagnostic on the drive. This could take a few hours. If the drive passes then it's good. IF it fails, it's bad.

 

[SkylineChiliMan]

Yeah I am suspecting a bad hard drive too. This is the 2nd time in a month that her \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM file has failed. When I tried to replace it with an older snapshot, I kept getting failure messages, and it was never able to copy. The systems also tends to turn off by itself.

I will give that diagnostic tool a try. With this added information do you think that the hard drive really is screwed up?

 

[Pr0d1gy]

Yes unfortunately.