harddrive can't be formatted past 60%

  • Thread starter Thread starter George Hester
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George Hester

I tried to run Windows XP on this had drive 1.6 GB. It failed 60% into the NTFS formatting. I then used Partition Magic 5 formating FAT16. It also had trouble getting past 60%. The drive would spin making two beeping noises and then power down. In a few seconds it would do this again. After about 40 cycles of this Partition Magic finished the job and without errors. The drive is old and had Windows 95 on it which I upgraded to Windows 2000. It took like 3 hours but it finally finished and worked. The Windows 95 files were on the disk. Anyone ever seen this behavior and suggest what it might be? The disk seemed to want to create a 2MB partition at the end of it but Partition Magic overcame that. The formatting from Windows could not.
 
1.6 GB??

It's probably not being detected properly, or it's bad. Try a Partition
Magic surface scan. Or shell out like $20 and buy a new 40GB drive. What are
you doing messing around with that thing!

-Max
 
I tried to run Windows XP on this had drive 1.6 GB. It failed
Click to expand...

<snip>

the drive is bad...don't bother with it...
it is way too small for XP anyway.

if you want to put it back in the original machine
and load win95 on it...
you can fdisk the drive at maybe 900 megs or so...
then reboot and format it.
though i would not trust the drive...
it may be good enough for an old "standby" machine
 
I tried to run Windows XP on this had drive 1.6 GB. It failed 60% into the
NTFS formatting. I then used Partition Magic 5 formating FAT16. It also
had trouble getting past 60%. The drive would spin making two beeping
noises and then power down. In a few seconds it would do this again. After
about 40 cycles of this Partition Magic finished the job and without errors.
The drive is old and had Windows 95 on it which I upgraded to Windows 2000.
It took like 3 hours but it finally finished and worked. The Windows 95
files were on the disk. Anyone ever seen this behavior and suggest what it
might be? The disk seemed to want to create a 2MB partition at the end of
it but Partition Magic overcame that. The formatting from Windows could
not.

--
George Hester

You should be able to get free diagnostic utilities from the drive
manufacturers website e.g. current Maxtor's use "Powermax" which can test
the drive and perform a "zero fill" on the drive. Running manufacturers
diagnostics would be a much more positive way of determining if there's a
problem and if so, possibly fixing it. Be aware that you will have little
space left on the drive after installing XP so I agree with the other poster
that this wont be a long term solution.

Paul
 
Max said:
1.6 GB??

It's probably not being detected properly, or it's bad. Try a Partition
Magic surface scan. Or shell out like $20 and buy a new 40GB drive. What are
you doing messing around with that thing!

-Max
Click to expand...

I did that. Partition Magic said No errrors. It's the only extra I had at the time.
 
philo said:
<snip>

the drive is bad...don't bother with it...
it is way too small for XP anyway.

if you want to put it back in the original machine
and load win95 on it...
you can fdisk the drive at maybe 900 megs or so...
then reboot and format it.
though i would not trust the drive...
it may be good enough for an old "standby" machine
Click to expand...

That's so weird. It was fine when it was running Win 95 and the upgrade to 2000. Then I stuck it in a dual proccesor machine and it's toast now???
 
Shep© said:
Partition Magic is not a low level hardware diagnostic.
Try, Powermax, http://tinyurl.com/4osje

Made by Maxtor/Free and works on all makes AFAIK :)
Click to expand...

It is worth while having some drives with under 8 GB max capacity
available, because they can be used almost anywhere. Older bioses
won't be subject to overflows or zero divides during automatic
initialization.
 
It is worth while having some drives with under 8 GB max capacity
available, because they can be used almost anywhere. Older bioses
won't be subject to overflows or zero divides during automatic
initialization.
Click to expand...

I like to keep a spare ATA133 PCI controller card lying
around for this reason. Beyond a certain age the drives
become less reliable. While 8GB is sufficiently large for
even a modern OS use, such a drive is now potentially over 7
years old.
 
kony said:
I like to keep a spare ATA133 PCI controller card lying
around for this reason. Beyond a certain age the drives
become less reliable. While 8GB is sufficiently large for
even a modern OS use, such a drive is now potentially over 7
years old.
Click to expand...

I would rather have a spare small capacity (low usage) drive lying around
because many of the older machines which have problems with larger drives
also fail to reliably support bootable PCI devices such as ATA controller
cards or NICs (or don't even have a PCI bus at all).

Paul
 
I would rather have a spare small capacity (low usage) drive lying around
because many of the older machines which have problems with larger drives
also fail to reliably support bootable PCI devices such as ATA controller
cards or NICs (or don't even have a PCI bus at all).
Click to expand...

If the machine is that old, and proprietary enough that it
can't be replaced, I'd consider using a flash-based drive.
Certainly it wouldn't cover all situations but might be good
for some.
 
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