Having problems installing OS. Please Help

[IrishMobster68]

I just recently went to do a standard reformat, something I typically do every few months. Went through the original Vista x64 Install and the install took several hours and froze during the completing installation step. I then tried to reinstall again and began receiving errors that the hard drive could not be formatted. I have 3 HD drives and tried them all. I began think maybe my hard drives went bad and ran seatools to check its health. Sea tools came back fine. Tried to install windows 7 beta thinking maybe it was a bad disk and the same error occurred. Then tried go back to XP 64 and got a partition incompatible error. Ive tested my ram, came back fine tested other disk drives same problems occurred. I recently got a new mobo and cpu and beginning to wonder if the mobo is bad. I haven't had any problems with it up till now. Is there something Im missing or test I can do to test the mobo?

Specs:
Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3
Phenom II x4 920
4gb Patriot ddr2 1066
Asus 4870
750w PSU
HDD: 150gb WD raptor, 250gb Seagate, 300gb Maxtor

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[bilbat]

Partition incompatible usually means one of three things: not formatted to NTFS; not formatted with default (4K, I think) cluster size; or, if installing to any other place than HD0, it can't find a suitable partition on HD0 to write its' boot files...
I recently went through 'install hell', as I use four VR's in two RAID0 pair for 4 OSs, in boot/swap pairs, and wanted my boots, as well as my swaps (which do work at large cluster size) to have larger clusters (for speed, as I use 128K striping) but, try as I might, windoze (VUx86, and x64, and W7βx86 and x64) all refused to use anything but default clusters... How I install (as my first accessible partition is an extended, 'logicaled' into two swap partitions) and will not accept the boot files for OS installed on the second drive, is to start by removing my HD0 extended, and replacing it with a primary, install, move the boot file/directory to the second drive, then repartition HD0's first as the extended, and proceed to do the two installs to HD0...
Also possible you have one of the Seagates affected by the 'diagnostic pause' problem:
You can do a model check and contact Seagate here:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931
I happened to have it handy as, I too, have a bad one... Takes a few days, though, to have them verify the problem and get you the firmware - I guess they're being picky because there are also some drives out there that can be bricked by inappropriate updating of the firmware...

 

[IrishMobster68]

Well, I ended up tearing everything out and rewiring everything. Working so far, I only have my raptor installed.

How would you recommend I go about formatting one of my other hard drives for more storage?

 

[bilbat]

It boils down to 'you can't' - but 'more storage' is a relative thing; let me try to explain:
you want the biggest clusters you can without wasting too much drive space - your average waste, per file, will be half your cluster size. Think of it this way - if you make your clusters 4k, and you write a file thats 4097 bytes long, it will take two clusters, or 8192 bytes on disk - thus, on average, because the file sizes will be random, your loss will be right in the middle... Now, you also have to consider a, - how many total files you have, and b, how big is your average file. Your speed will be related to how the cluster and average file size compare, and your waste will be 1/2 the cluster times the number of files. If you'd like a utility to show you how these relate, take a peek here:
http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dltreesize.html