Windows could not format?

[Sanius]

hello. Earlier today windows screwed up, and I had to reinstall windows. now I am trying to format my D: drive so i can start over, when it finished, it said something about it not being able to format. thats all it said. I tried to format again, and when it gets to one block, it stays there. but it continues loading. my C: partition is doing fine.

C and D are off a maxtor 120 gig 7200 rpm 8mb cache harddrive. I am running XP pro.

 

[ts3433]

I'm not quite sure what it might be. I'd try it again, deleting all partitions first and then formatting with the ones you need.

 

[Sanius]

Nope.

 

[imported_fozzybear]

could be that your hard drive is physically failing

 

[The J]

If you are using Windows XP, when you first get into the installer go into the Recovery Console by pressing R when it first asks you what you want to do.
When you get there, it will ask you what Windows installation you want to modify and will list them.
Be sure to press 1 (assuming one OS) before hitting Enter. Pressing Enter without a number will cause the Recovery Console to exit.
When it asks for an Administrator password, just press Enter without typing in anything. You'll be taken to the command prompt (C:\WINDOWS).
Type in (without the quotes) "format d: /u" and hit Enter. The /u will force an unconditional format, which means that the Console will attempt to format the drive even if there's bad sectors on it.

 

[dunkster]

Your HD manufacturer surely offers a downloadable utility for testing the integrity of the drive. It'll run sequential read/write operation over the entire surface of the drive, report all error-sites and attempt to fix these error-sites by locking them out. If possible, it'll relocate data from bad sectors to good sectors, to prevent any data loss. If you get a ton of errors reported, I'd replace the HD.

Hope this helps!

 

[Sanius]

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...6652&enterthread=y - please read here. I already got formatting working.