[Simwod]

Hi everone, and thanks for the invalualbe site you have here!

I bought a new internal hard disk drive (HDD) as my old one was reaching compacity. I had some difficuly installing it as I was confused by the variety of physical pin options available on the the back of the disk. I went back to PC world and the workmen told me to put them all to standard configuration. Please excuse my crude illustration, but it looks something like this [':I:I] SO I went along with his advice and everything worked well for a short while.

I cloned my old disk onto my new one and switched them around, so the old drive was now the slave drive. Afer the 'blue screen' I couldn't even get windows to load up. I cannot remember everything I tried but it seemed to be that the new drive was the problem. After much stress, doom and gloom, I decided, to switch the drives back to their original primary/slave positions, re-install everything on the original Crive (smaller one), and use the larger one as the slave drive. (not really sure why i didn't just do this in the first place!)

Anyway, the larger drive (lets call it D: from now on) is not functioning at all! I have already salvaged most of the important documents from it, and would just lke to get the bugger running again. I have tried formating it, which gets to 1%, then says 'Windows was unable to complete the format'. If I select 'my computer>D:>Properties, it says the drive is completely full! I've tried updating the driver, but I already have the latest version

I basicaly just want to wipe the drive and start afresh. Is there anything else I can do, or is the drive a complete write-off? It's only 2 years old so I would've thought it would be salvageable.. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Technical Info:
Windows XP - Service Pack 3
Pentium 2 processor
Old drive (now C IC35L060AVV207-A (working fine)
Newer problematic drive: HDT722516DLAT8
Both drives made by Hitchi I think.

Thanks for you time reading this. Hope you can help!

[Wolfeymole]

Can I just ask ask why your trying to run XP SP3 on a Pentium 2 CPU Simwod?

Welcome to Free PC Help by the way.

[mike]

Hi Simwod, welcome to Free PC Help

First of all, many thanks for the detailed description of the problem and the technical information; it's a real help in the long run.

Ok, if you’re just wanting to format your D: drive and it is failing at 1%, I would suggest you use the Disk Management tool which can be found by;

Start > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > Administrative Tools. Double click Computer Management and then click Disk Management

Once open I suggest that you read the following sections (in this order) from the Microsoft Article located at "How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP"

How to delete a partition or a logical drive – Only if your drive has been split up into partitions, which by the sounds of your description above, it hasn’t.

How to format a basic volume


Hope this helps, and problems or questions please feel free to post back.
Mike