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SATA hardddrive not formatting properly

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ThisImminentDay   05-25-2009 at 12:08:50 AM

I have a 1.5TB drive I picked up, unfortunately it's a White Label, so no specific manufacturer. It's a SATA interface, hooked up to an Asus MN2-SLI Deluxe motherboard, running under Vista x64, SP2. Bios sees it under the SATA slot 2, and it took a bit of effort to get it to appear in My Computer in windows, but now I see it. The problem is now, the drive isn't formatted; file system is currently RAW. I'm trying to format it to NTFS, so I can use it. I marked it as active, primary partition, and Drive Management seems to think everything is ok with it. The problem is, every time I try to format it, it takes about 8 hours, reaches 100%, then gives me "couldn't complete format", and I'm back at square one. I'm beginning to suspect I may have a lemon here, but I'd like to be sure I'm not missing something before I return it. Any ideas?

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phone_trouble   05-25-2009 at 12:56:50 AM
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Maybe you would have some luck if you went to either WD or Seagate website, download their installation software and tried one of them.
I have had some luck in this area with non labeled drives.
http://support.wdc.com/product/dow [...] s&x=14&y=4

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/s [...] discwizard

Could be an Hitachi, but I doubt it.

ThisImminentDay wrote :

I have a 1.5TB drive I picked up, unfortunately it's a White Label, so no specific manufacturer. It's a SATA interface, hooked up to an Asus MN2-SLI Deluxe motherboard, running under Vista x64, SP2. Bios sees it under the SATA slot 2, and it took a bit of effort to get it to appear in My Computer in windows, but now I see it. The problem is now, the drive isn't formatted; file system is currently RAW. I'm trying to format it to NTFS, so I can use it. I marked it as active, primary partition, and Drive Management seems to think everything is ok with it. The problem is, every time I try to format it, it takes about 8 hours, reaches 100%, then gives me "couldn't complete format", and I'm back at square one. I'm beginning to suspect I may have a lemon here, but I'd like to be sure I'm not missing something before I return it. Any ideas?


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MrLinux   05-25-2009 at 08:20:15 AM
- 0 +

Make sure you have the latest chip-set drivers from Asus web site.

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ThisImminentDay   05-25-2009 at 04:25:46 PM
- 0 +

Phone_trouble, thanks! I tried the Seagate Disk Wizard, and now the drive is working fine. Disk Management sees the drive as NTFS file structure, and now I can use it. Strange thing is, when formatting the drive through Disk Management, it'd take about 8 or 9 hours to do a complete format, yet through the Seagate wizard, I had the thing up and running in less than 5 minutes. Regardless, thanks for the suggestion!

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Bronze Storage badge Paperdoc   05-25-2009 at 08:29:18 PM
- 0 +

If Seagate Disk Wizard did a Format in 5 minutes, it was a Quick Format, which does NOT run a test on every sector. That's OK. In fact, you MIGHT have done the Full Format earlier, but you have no real confirmation since your attempts all ended incompletely.

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