SATA, formatting fails

[lasse]

I can not get my new SATA drives formatted with NTFS regardless of the size I try. I can, however, format them as FAT32!!!
The system is running a fresh Windows XP with SP2 and updates.
- It boots from an IDE disk on IDE1.
- It has a PCI SATA card with two Hitachi 7K250 attached to it.

I am running Computer Management -> Disk Management to create a primary partition and to format the disk(s). The formatting starts and when it has reached 99 procent it
stops with an error that it did not finish. (in swedish "Formateringen slutfördes inte").

The SATA card uses SiI3112 controller chip and after these problems I downloaded the new driver 1.0.0.51 and installed it and tried again with various sizes without any difference.

In Computer Management the two SATA disks show up as Disk 0 and Disk 1 and my IDE boot disk C: as Disk 2.
Before the SATA drivers were installed the IDE disk was Disk 0
Any idéas what next to do?

 

[lasse]

Problem solved but not found.
The PCI-SATA board works together with the hard drives in another computer with the same OS. I have however replaced that PCI-SATA controller board with another brand. I am guessing that I had a good old hardware conflict but I have not verified that.

 

[addiarmadar]

Sounds like a PoS SATA controller. If you have on-board SATA ports then try to put it in there and format it. If the driver is part of a raid, break the raid and low leverl format the drive and reformat in NTFS again.

Really you need try try a better SATA controller to make sure the card isnt a dud

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