Need help formatting HD

[wuut]

I currently have 2 WD 80G hard drives. Athlon 2700 1 gig of ram, runnning windows XP home. About 2 months ago my primary drive "C" decided to slow way down, almost to a crawl. Which caused me to switch my whole system to my backup drive "D". The switch worked. However, I am trying to clear out my whole "C" hard drive by formatting it and have fallen short many of times. I am a rookie when it comes to formatting so please be easy on me with your suggestions. Thank you for any help!

 

[grafixmonkey]

It's more likely that your "drive slowed down" because of some software you installed, possibly accidentally. If you accidentally get Gator or some other kinds of spyware on your system, it makes the system access the disk a whole lot, all the time.

Could you explain what you mean by "fallen short?" Do you mean the format process failed partway through? Or it refused to format the C drive? Or it formatted it but now you can't see it?

And by "switch your whole system to your backup drive" you mean you cloned your data over, or you installed a new copy of windows, or just used windows to copy all your files, or what?

 

[wuut]

Thanks for responding.
To answer your first question. I tried to format the drive through windows explorer. It would go through the process but in the end just give me a message "unable to format" That was the only message without an explanation. I have also tried formatting through the disk manager and was uable to even figure out how to get started. A few people had told me to delete a partition on my hard drive and then format a new partition but that is where I get stuck figuring out how. I knew a software program was most likely slowing my system down but I couldn't figure it out so I just started over.

The second question is that I installed windows again on my "d" drive and copied my "c" drive information onto a backup disk. Then transfered it that way.

Thanks again.

 

[grafixmonkey]

well it's pretty odd for a format to fail partway through unless the disk is bad. Download a disk checking utility from the manufacturer website, like PowerMax if it's a Maxtor drive. I think the Hitachi website has a more or less universal drive checker (works with all brands.) That will tell you straight away whether the drive platter itself is good or not.

Sometimes your disk can continue "working" long after a failure, simply because you haven't tried to read from the section of disk that has failed yet. Happened to me, the instant I tried to delete a file that'd been on there since the last time it was formatted, it crashed.