Should I do something?

[rjbarry]

Background: I bought a WD Caviar Green 2TB disk, tried to format it and it gave tons of IO errors. So I took it back to the store and exchanged it.

On the new one, using the built in Vista Disk Management tool, I created two 50 GB partitions at the front of the disk (I'm going to install two operating systems) and formatted them - no problem, they are working.

The issue: I am trying to format the rest of the disk (~1.7 TB) . It is now Sunday afternoon and I started formatting it Friday afternoon. After a few hours on Friday it progressed to 52% and then stalled there for several hours.

My wife then closed the Disk Management screen, doh! I reopened it and it shows the disk as "Formatting" but I cannot see a percentage.

I have been coming back every so often to look and it stills says "formatting.

I have brought up "Event Viewer" on the "System" tab and I do not see any errors logged.

Questions: Any ideas what is wrong? Is it possible that this will eventually finish? Should I stop it, reboot and try again?

 

[Emulex]

run perfmon and look at average disk queue if its not at 1.0 or higher the drive probably is dead /hung.

 

[Voo]

My wife then closed the Disk Management screen, doh! I reopened it and it shows the disk as "Formatting" but I cannot see a percentage.

Just so that you don't accuse your wife of something she's completely innocent - closing the disk managment screen is perfectly fine and after 3 days we can be sure that something's not right and more waiting definitely won't help (formatting 2tb takes its time, but we're still measuring it in hours, not days).

I would restart to disqualify software problems, but sounds more like a dead drive. See it from the postive side.. better than it giving up after 2 weeks with data on it

 

[rjbarry]

Thanks for the quick reply!

It looks like my average is hovering right around 1 (though occurring in a spiked pattern on the line graph.) I selected physical disk 1 and it showed the drive letters of the two already formatted partitions, so I'm assuming that I am using this tool correctly.

The only file on the already formatted partition is that I already created an active swap file on one but disk reads and writes /s is showing pretty much zero.

Given this situation, should I just hold tight and hope it finishes? What would be the longest I should wait (given that it has already been 48 hours.)

(I assuming that since the original disk management screen was closed, there is no way to get the format "% complete" information back.)

R

 

[rjbarry]

Oops - I was responding to the other poster while Voo posted.

I guess that answers my question. Maybe I will reboot and then do a quick format for the first 50% of the unformatted region - since that seemed to be fine. Then I will start a format for the rest of the disk - I can always re-partition it back to a single volume later.

R

 

[superccs]

Formatting a 2TB drive should only take like an hour or so.

 

[rjbarry]

Ok... it has been an adventure. Tried a dozen different times and a few different software packages to format this disk but it always choked with IO errors for any partition created past the 1 TB mark. Here is a summary of my last 3 attempts that I felt might be helpful to others.

Attempt 1 - Flashed my BIOS to bring it current (asus p5n-e sli). Installed latest Nvidia nforce drivers. No change - Vista still chokes on any partition past the 1TB mark.

Attempt 2 - Booted a Linux Live DVD ... had no problems setting up the disk with GParted! It was dreamy! Was able to format the entire two TB as NTFS partitions. Created a bunch of files and directories. Sweet! Rebooted to Vista... disk was unrecognized again :'(. Couldn't access it at all in Disk Management, had to use diskpart and clean it.

Attempt 3 - Decided to try one more thing. Rebooted to Linux again. Same as before, created an NTFS partition for the 1st terabyte. However, for the rest of the disk I made it FAT32. Tested it out - it worked fine under Linux. Reboot to Vista... (drum roll) ... it worked! Ran chkdsk /r overnight to make sure. Seems fine. I'm syncing a bunch of files onto it today while I'm at work to see if it holds up... but I think it will be fine at this point.

So I'm declaring a half-hearted success. Even though I would have preferred the whole disk be NTFS I guess I'm ok with a large FAT32 partition. Any reason anyone can think of why it would work as FAT32 and not NTFS?

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Note 1: WD support site frustrations
There is an article on the WD site that forwards Vista users to an MS KB article that seems to explain the problem (maybe - down in "issue 2" of the article) as related to their new "Advanced Format" technology. However, the hotfix is very specifically not for Vista... so I'm not sure why they sent me there... to tease me? Also, the "Data Lifeguard" application, downloaded directly from the WD support site link specifically for the the green drive... recognized both my WD Caviar Black and Green in the system - but it said the WD Caviar Green was unsupported!!! Both of these things wasted a lot of my time and added to the aggravation of this experience. Since I think the drive problems are Vista related I don't blame the actual product (it works fine when I boot in Linux.) However, due to the shoddy support site I'm pretty sure I won't by another WD product anytime soon.

Note 2: Vista registry to blame?
Some research I did since implies that after attempt 2, Vista may have been just confused because of the partition changes since the last boot and that I could have potentially just cleaning out some registry entries (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices) prior to shutting down Vista and launching the Gparted live CD... I'm tempted see if I can recreate the issue to test this and see if I can't get the whole drive formatted as NTFS. Any thoughts out there?