Hard Drive Not Formatting

[Jaimie]

Hello, I have a serious issue. One of my female friends computers broke down, and I was able to recover all her vital files. I was going to install Windows XP Home Edition (it's what she has) on it, but I cannot seem to get the drive to format in NTFS now. I deleted the partitions in the Win XP install and then created a new partition. Then I told it to install windows on that partition and format in NTFS. However, it's not cooperating too well. It is a 6 year old Maxtor 40GB drive, which was working before.

Part of the problem initially was that it was a Compaq, I thought that was the problem at least. However, I had already formated one partition in NTFS for 2k (but that was corrupted as well as the other). It's also plugged up through my rig now. I really need help with fixing this desperately.

It seems to hang at 0 in both the XP Home install and on my own machine, is there any other way I could do it? Quick format jumps to 20% and then stops.

Help a guy in trouble,
Jaimie

 

[montag451]

have you got partition manager.
If you have, shove the drive onto the computer, delete all the partitions, then create them. Then a good old partition manager format

 

[bendixG15]

Try writing all zeros (low level format).

 

[Jaimie]

How do you do a low-level format again?

I was able to format it through a quick format mode in WinXP from my hard drive with hers plugged in. I can also install the OS partially, however after I need to reboot to get out of the blue screened install section, it returns: "Error operating system not found" on bootup. I have never had issues with installing the OS before on over 15 computers, and now this crap is happening... ahg...