format error


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Subject: format error
Name: Kenny
Date: 3/31/2005 8:22:21 AM (GMT-7)
IP Address: 67.139.132.26
Message:

Have a dell dimension 8400 that needed a format and reinstall of XP Pro. It has one of those new SATA drives so I found the intel sata driver floppy creator off dell's website and got into windows setup. I deleted the partitions that were on it and created one new one and told it to format NTFS. It took over an hour (160gb drive) and got to 100%. Then it told me that setup was unable to format the partition. So not know what else to do, I thought I'd reboot and try again. Got in there again and tried to delete the new-yet-unformatted partition and it said it could not delete it, and then the partition list said setup cannot access the disk. Rebooted into setup again and after this I can't even get to the partition list anymore, after it loads the initial modules it says starting windows setup and it freezes there. I tried the maxtor maxblast setup utility which told me my drive was not ready for use and asked me if i wanted to set up so I said yes and chose XP with sp1, ntfs, and when it tried it failed. It suggested running diagnostics so I download maxtor's diagnostic program, which didn't see the disk at all. Then when I went back to maxblast, it didn't see the disk anymore. Dell techs had me run their express test, which threw a bunch of errors "Block# Uncorrectable Data Error or Media Unwritable" for a ton of blocks (we didn't let it finish checking). Then the dell ctrl-alt-d hard drive diagnostic said Fail-Return Code 7. The tech is sending a new drive.

Question is... doesn't this seem strange? The disk wasn't acting like it had a problem before I tried that first format. Windows had been booting and running just fine, we just had a spyware problem and 2 other programs no longer working correctly. I don't think I did anything wrong in the setup process; I am new to SATA, but it seemed like my driver disk worked alright at first. Do you think that somewhere in the process of formatting it is when the disk randomly failed?

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