Formatting a hardrive... trying to recover an allocation unit

[dcdomain]

So I really messed up a couple of months ago, deleting, recreating partitions etc.
So this time I FDISKed, redid my partitions from scratch and started formatting. It's been stuck ... "Trying to recover allocation unit 379,617" for at least 30 minutes right now. The underscore under T is still blinking, but I'm getting a little restless. Is there a way to just stop it, don't let it recover the unit? Or will this happen everytime I format? Perhaps I shouldn't format and just let Win2K do it when it installs? Suggestions?

 

[dcdomain]

Gave up and rebooted. Formatted the D: without a hitch, tried formatting C: again, at 67 percent, I hear the harddrive making a repetitive noise, and again it gives me the error:

Trying to recover allocation unit 379,497 weird how it's a different allocation unit than before... hope my rebooting didn't screw up another unit. DOH!

Now it's up to 379,546 so I guess the recovering is working, although very slowly... hopefully there's not that many units that need to be recovered.

 

[japetto]

Try downloading and running a low level formatting utility from your hd manufacturer.

 

[sean2002]

Sounds to me like you have a few bad sectors

 

[dcdomain]

Does anyone have a Toshiba Low Level format utility? I can't find one, and even my harddrive isn't listed on the Toshiba site, although they have plenty of other drives that were older or around the same specs as mine. But no low level format utility. I'm guessing I can't use one from other manufacturers like Maxtor right, because I found a bunch of those as well as WD's.

I ran SpinRite, a lot of bad sectors... I thought it would be okay to just mark them and be done with it...

I'm trying to install Win2k or WinXP, everytime I go into the i386 folder to run it, it states that it can't load the NT Bootloader... should I try using some kind of BIOS format utility? I was reading about that on some random websites, warning me not to ever use it...

 

[Mark R]

You need to replace the drive. Even a single bad sector indicates a critical failure of the drive mechanism. Rapid deterioration of the drive is extremely likely within an unpredictable time period (probably short).

If the drive is in warranty, you should get the test/diagnosis software from the manufacturer's web site, and submit the error code to get a return authorisation.

 

[dcdomain]

Damnit.. well it's a laptop I only use for browsing the web and email... so it's not critical, was hoping to stay away from buying another harddrive for a while... but guess not. Damn Toshiba, I can't find any utilities ANYWHERE from them. Stupid support.

 

[dcdomain]

WTF..
Okay, here goes my story.. my laptop doesn't have a CDROM drive, so what I've been doing is switching the harddrive into a laptop w/cdrom, copying the install files over and then swapping it back to install. The thing is, it install fines on the laptop with the cdrom, but not when I switch it back. WEIRD... didn't happen like this before.