Machine not formating large drive yet everything done to see it, thoughts?

[bozack]

Here is the deal, my buddy has a 160 gb hd, Running XP and updated to SP1, modified registry to enable big LBA, ran MS hotfixed that updated Happy.sys, updated the bios on Mobo and verified that new bios supports large drives, he can see the full drive in disc manager but he cannot format it, whenever he tries to format it he gets the error "cannot complete operation", he was able to make a small partition on the drive (72gb) but then was unable to partition the rest of the drive, he has tried this on two drives now and is certain it is not the drive....also the drive is set up as a slave and is formatted in NTFS

any thoughts on why this is going on?

motherboard is a gigabyte titan 533 ga-8iexp
Pentium 4 2.26a with 1 gig of system ram
Hard Drive manufacturer is Seagate

Any thoughts appreciated, thanks

 

[bozack]

Looks like this guy is having the same problem

http://forums.sudhian.com/messageview.cfm?catid=76&threadid=42381

Im usually post on the SFF forum since I have 2 XPCs, but in this case Ive come across something odd with a new HD.

I bought a new 160 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (8 MB cache) a couple of weeks back for AV storage. I had immense difficulties formating the drive, even though I knew about the 137 gb limit in Win XP and so forth. Both the bios and the OS reported the HD as being a 160 gb drive. The disk just would´nt format at all whatever I used. It said "could not complete format". Neither in prompt, in OS or in Seagate´s installed Disc Wizard 2003. The only way I finally could to it, was by downloading a self-bootable-ISO with tools from Seagate, burning it to a cd-rewritable and then rebooting. Then, I managed to force the program to format the HD to 149 gb.

Since then the HD has been acting strangely. I cant get any read-errors when using "chkdsk" or scanning it quickly. It will never complete an real deep scan of the disk for some reason ("could not complete scan" or something like that). If I try to do a real hard transfer like trying to view uncompressed video on it, after a while it starts choking the HD down and it then freezez ....and starts BEEPING!!!???
After this, the whole system freezez and I have to reboot, but the error also freezez the bios startup, because the HD is still beeping and spinning like crazy. I CANNOT reset and get past bios-selfcheck after this happens. But, if I wait 5 min and startup the computer, it works again....and I can usually use the HD without anything strange happening (although, Ive only had it a couple of weeks and havnt used it much).
This could be related to the strain put on the cpu though, but it doesnt explain why the HD is beeping, or why the HD-activity keeps running. On another computer this would only result in the video not playing for a couple of seconds and then resuming once it fills the cache again. You can also hear the HD searching with clicking, winding noises (very faint though) in an infinite loop. I´m almost sure the freezing is HD-related. My assumption so far is that its busted somehow, but it might not be enough to prove to the vendor I bought it from, its faulty. Does anyone have any thoughts on what this could be? Once playing a particular .avi, I got and "I/O Error" too.

I havnt found much on similar issues on beeping HDs. Anyone?

Cheers.

 

[imported_Killswitch]

have u tried doin a quick format rather than the full one?