Non-crashable HD format...

[KillerShots]

OK, I've been using XP for a while now, but now I've a problem... I was having some random crashes (no blue screen, just system halts) earlier and decided, well, my system was in such chaos that it probably warranted starting from scratch (boot system on slowest hard drive of three, fastest hard drive paired with CD-ROM, etc.)... Before I did this, I told Windows to do a surface scan on each drive, which came up clean.

Now, I've re-arranged the drives as I desired and am currently installed on a small 10-gig partition on my fastest drive. I was about to partition up the other drives when the format halted.... rebooted, tried again, and the format halted again at the same spot. Basically, I need something that can map out bad sectors on a drive and record it to the drive's BIOS (old hardware did this all the time) and I'm going to cross my fingers and hope this isn't a malignant problem (not going to spread).

So, if Windows Format halts the system, what other options are there?

[Raqia]

Don't be too sure it's necessarily the harddrive giving you grief. It could be that your ram is flakey and you should try less aggressive timings or different ram altogether. These symptoms occurred to me once and it was the ram that was the trouble. It seems my motherboard doesn't like to use pairs of dimms very much or aggressive timings. Try running memtest86 (google it) on your machine and see if it comes out clean.

[zerocopy]

try partitoning it, thats what i do to salvage some space from corrupted hard drives (btw the symptons you've given is a hint of your h.d failing)

if your really desperate i suggest using a low level format, usually takes 5-8 hrs to finish, if the hanging symptons persist there isnt much you can do

[KillerShots]

I checked my event log after resetting and it told me that HD 2 had bad blocks... I let it try to format overnight and it never got past 5%. I was able to format both of my other drives completely, and the RAM should be fine (I've been using it for over a year).

EDIT: OK, a low-level format worked - I successfully formatted the drive(s) and can use them... I'm crossing my fingers, tho, on whether or not it will stay good

EDIT2: Argh, the same happened to my primary (80G) hard drive. I've marked the bad sectors on that as well, and am crossing my fingers... It would really suck to have to replace them both The third drive seems fine tho (It had some bad sectors that I let Linux fix about 8 months back)

[Aleksei (St)]

how can i low level format?

[Kane]

Find a low level formatting tool. Some BIOSes can also do that.

[finalight]

but where do you find such Bioses? it's quite rare to find them though

[zerocopy]

your mobo maker should have them on their site, or try a search engine some bioses are modified by other people and not by the manufacturers themselve's

[Cylinder]

Originally posted by Aleksei (St)
how can i low level format?

Try your drives website for starters. They should have a diagnostic tool that should be able to 0 your drives well as other options.

Here is a few links to the more popular drive's sites software tools pages.

Maxtor's Powermax

Western Digital

Seagate Support

and if you have an IBM drive or others... I'm sorry :P.

[finalight]

What's the difference between different levels of formatting?

[Cylinder]

Formating using the quick method in windows basicly re-writes the file table and doesn't 'remove' any data still on the drive. A full formatting does a better job of it. Doing a drive 0'ing completely writes the drive to all 0's so it is back to the same level as when it was first installed in your PC and not fdisked/partitioned/formatted. If you have intentions of selling a drive its is recomended you 0 write a drive to make it harder for shadly persons to get info from it.

[Galway no Sora]

Heh, yeah. And you can think how much time low level format for my friend's 120GB HDD...

[Chinoz]

Lol 120gb w/o partitions?? Hmm...one night at least

[KillerShots]

Also, if there's bad sectors, a simple format will simply crash the computer (at least with XP). I seem to remember that format used to map out bad sectors for you (the full, non-low-level format), but I don't have that anymore. The solution for me was to visit both Western Digital (for my 20 gig) and Maxtor (for my 80 gig) sites and download the following:

1. Western Digital: windlg10.exe - A nice utility - I didn't even have to reboot to map out the bad sectors. Do the advanced scan, and you won't crash when scanning it out . Note: Their utility appears to be universal for all western digital drives

2. Maxtor: PowerMax406.exe - Creates a bootable floppy that offers a few options. I only had to screw around with the advanced scan (thankfully) to get it working. However, their tools don't look to be universal - you may well need to pick your drive by model number to get the appropriate software for it.