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Formatting for WinXP install, stuck at 99 percent

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kiyoshilionz

Member
Joined
May 20, 2004
Location
Wheaton, IL
I'm reinstalling windows on my main rig and right now I'm on the screen that says that my hard drive is being formatted. It's 160GB, so it's pretty big. It's IDE, 7200rpm, 8mb cache. It's been stuck at 99% for quite a while now, nearly 20 minutes, I haven't done this in a long time and I can't remember if this is normal or not. Or has my computer frozen?
 
Just a guess but it may be due to a bad hard drive. This usually happend when there are bad sectors on the hard drive. See if you can download HD tools from the MF's website to fix the sectors before you format the HD. This will fix the bad sectors for a little bit but chances are more new bad sectors will apear if you have more than one. If you have two or more bad sectors on your HD, I would recommend RMA the HD.
 
Yeah the thing just threw me a bad hard drive error. I'm trying to do the format again, but it'll probably be fruitless.

Can I RMA an old Maxtor hard drive w/o any reciepts or anything like that?
 
I have RMA it without reciepts all the time. Just call them and complain. It's suppose to have a life time warrenty. It's does not matter who buys it or when.

Also, there should be some dianostic tools you can download and run off floppy to fix those errors.
 
Are you doing a quick format or a regular format. A regular format takes a lot longer because it also does a chkdsk which could help correct the errors that are present on your drive. Give it a shot. Also, you could maybe try a low level format. There's two types of formatting. A low level and a high level. The low level is done during the manufacturing process. Then the customer does the partitioning then the high level formatting.

Most of the low level formatting utilities have been removed from the manufacturer's websites but you can download it here. If this doesn't work, you'll be out of luck due to this voiding your warranty. If I were you, i'd just RMA the drive if it's still under warranty. I'd only try a low level format if your hard drive is NOT warrantied anymore.
http://www.ameriwebs.net/groupworks/index.html

Note: LOW LEVEL FORMATTING WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY
 
Warranty's out on both of my drives. I just have to make sure I don't blow up the other drive - I've got 2 of these 160gb drives, one of them is crap and the other one has backups of everything - music, video, tv shows, etc. and lotsa other crap i dont wanna lose.

So if I call in and complain enough it may get me a new drive?
 
kiyoshilionz said:
So if I call in and complain enough it may get me a new drive?

Doubtful. I'd give it a try though. I'd try low level formatting it also since it's out of warranty anyways. I found that website I linked previously with the utilities from googling something like, "Western digital low level format." I have never used those utilities so I'd turn off the ide controller for your backup drive in case that utility is something bogus or messes up since it's not from a manufacturer's website. Heck, i'd remove your backup drive altogether just in case.
 
Yeah, I was running RAID 1 so I had 2 identical drives. I was reformatting one while leaving the other one disconnected cuz it was the backup. And now the one getting reformatted is the bad one.

Right now I'm running Windows off the backup drive, but I gotta be careful now that I don't have a backup at all. Could I do a low-level format of the slave drive (the bad one) from windows with something? Or run a utility to check it?
 
There's also this site which allows you to download Western Digital tools for hard drive diagnostics and such. Not sure if it gives you low level formatting options though.

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=1

As for any sort of software that provides low level formatting directly inside Windows, not sure. I did do some googling and came across this utility on Western Digital website that provides low level formatting for certain disk controllers (not sure if you're in this category).

Mc7fmtp.exe Utility from:
http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp

One question I have from you since I'm not familiar with RAID setups, is that if you have a RAID 1 which I know is mirroring, lets say one drive fails and you have the backup copy such as in your case. How would you go about rebuilding your array so the backup drive recopies all of its data to your fixed drive?
 
Maxtor olso has a hard drive utility tool Maxbalst 3, they now have maxblast 4, I might be wrong but you have to have a WD drive to use their tool same for maxtor, You need a maxtor drive istalled. I formatted and partitioned my 200 gig maxtor with maxblast 3.
 
I did the low-level format, formatted it to NTFS using PartitionMagic, and then ran multiple scans on it and found no problems. Except SMART - Self-Monitoring program in the BIOS - tells me that my hard drive is corrupted and should be replaced. It's working fine with a new windows install, so I don't see a problem. I'm not going to be keeping any really important stuff on here anyways so if it does go bad, I won't be SOL.
 
smart isnt exactly smart all the time ... but as you stated .. dont keep important stuff, or at least make back-ups of what you need.
 
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