Reformatting taking forever

[f1oored]

I am trying to do a fresh install of XP Pro on a...
Soyo KT 600 Plus
XP2600+
80GB HD
5200FX
IO Magic DVD Burner
512mb generic ram

We started formatting the new partition (after deleting the old) about 20 min ago and it just now hit 1%. Something is wrong. I wasn't sure if it was a bios problem or if maybe the HD is bad. If anyone has any suggestions, I am at a loss.

[John Prophet]

Weird...have you tried to start it over and see if it was just a fluke?

[ragtop]

As John P said - start over & see what happens. If its still slow, run the manufacturer's diagnostic program on the HDD.

One more "shot in the dark": I seem to recall a similar thread a week or so ago. Turned out that the L1 & L2 cache were disabled in BIOS, causing everything to slow way down. (Its a long shot - but wouldn't hurt to check)

[f1oored]

I already restarted the format once. The first time, after 10 minutes I figured it was locked up so I restarted. I'll restart again and check the cache.

[John Prophet]

Try it on another machine.

I dont know why but some motherboard/cpu/hard drive combos seem slow....for instance I do a LOT of ghosting for various reasons...on occasion I will get a customers comp and Ill go to ghost it and it'll tell me it has 23 hrs to go...Im like "yeah, right"...so I take out their hard drive and the other hard drive and go to an old Dell optiplex and it'll finish in 7 minutes, lol.

Go figure.

But you would think a new board would rip on thru a format.

I wonder if there is any weird possibility that it is doing a thorough scandisk first for some reason??

[RedFury]

< Raises Hand > Tha'd be me with the disabled cache. Good chance that it is in fact, disabled. My install of XP lasted 7 hours, and this was with a 2500+ Barton, and 512 PC2700.

You should think that the BIOS would not even touch the L1 and L2 cache, but it disabled them for me.

Wouldn't suprise me if this wasn't the case. The format took forever on the drive too, and it was a WD 80 gig with the 8mb cache.

[John Prophet]

A cool way to format is to take a smallish (2g etc) hard drive and format it.

Then run ghost and make a restore disk of the blank formatted hard drive.

Then boot up...ghost it to the hard drive....blammo, instant formatted drive....takes like 1 second.

I have a "restore" disk that I use for that. The only catch is that you need to do an "fdisk /mbr" afterward or when you install windows (at least w98se) it wont restart when it needs to after the install..it'll just sit there and you have to boot off a floppy and do fdisk /mbr anyway and then reboot and it'll finish the install.



One cool variation might be to make a "restore disk" that has the windows "cab" files or the "i386" folder only. That would also do the instant format trick but youd have the cab files there and you could boot from a floppy and do the install.

JP

[f1oored]

OK I checked the L1 L2 cache and they are both enabled. Still slow. I reset the bios. Still slow. I don't have a second HD with me so I can't try that. I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow unless anyone has any other suggestions.

I'm going to try the restore disk with only the cab files now