Unable to Format Hard Drive

[rrcn]

Hey, I have an old 4GB ATA66 Seagate hard drive. I'm trying to format it but it wont pass 83% completion. I'm formating it with the windows cd. I tried XP and 2000 and both stop at 83%. I also tried hooking it up as a slave to a hd that has XP on it. The bios recognizes the HD but windows doesnt recognize the it. It also takes windows a long time to load.

Does anyone know what it means when it stops at 83%?

Ciryix MII 266MHz
Gigabyte G5SAA (latest bios)
4GB HD
64mb pc100
lite-on cd-rom

TIA

[Omardeth]

maybe a bad sector on it is stopping it .

[PresterJohn]

try formatting it with a dos/win9x boot disk. sounds like the drive may be bad.

[Bill in SD, CA]

Or try doing a low level format using manufacturer's disk.

Bill

[John Prophet]

have you tried running scandisk on it?

[rrcn]

Ok, I'll try formatting it with a win 98 boot disk. I'm guessing to run scandisk that I'd have to do it through dos. I dont know how to do that. If you can please let me know.

Thanks.

[PresterJohn]

Originally posted by rrcn
Ok, I'll try formatting it with a win 98 boot disk. I'm guessing to run scandisk that I'd have to do it through dos. I dont know how to do that. If you can please let me know.

i doubt if scandisk will work if the format stopped at 83%. boot w/the win98 disk. run FDISK to delete and recreate the partition. you'll be prompted to reboot. then run Format C:

[rrcn]

I ran scandisk and if found no errors. I dunno why. Anyway, I ran fdisk, deleted the partition and recreated the partition. I'm now formatting, but when it got to 83% it said: "Trying to recover allocation unit 874,889" then it started upping the numbers (started from 874,889) and its till doing that now.

I'll let you know what happens next.

[PresterJohn]

Originally posted by rrcn
I'm now formatting, but when it got to 83% it said: "Trying to recover allocation unit 874,889" then it started upping the numbers (started from 874,889) and its till doing that now.

that's a pretty good sign the drive is unreliable. you could d/l the seatools from seagate and run a media diagnostic say but i wouldn't rely too heavily on that drive.

[rrcn]

so does that mean that there is a bad cluster? if so, is there a way to skip over that cluster and ignore it so that I can install windows with out any problems?

thank you all.