How Long Is Supposed to take??

[ViLo]

Formating a 80 gig drive, partitioned into 2???

All Day??

WD800 SATA Drive/WinXP

10.q

 

[seryozha]

depends on what program you are using to do it and what kind of options you selected.

 

[ViLo]

depends on what program you are using to do it and what kind of options you selected.

WinXp, Administrative tools.............it took all day, and did not finish formating......

Thanks

 

[Nosferous]

I recently did a 20GB format of my remaining space for a new partition for some temp stuff and used the long format in XP Pro admin area took under an hour. Can't see 40GB being much more than an hour forbid a whole freaking day- sounds odd...

 

[ViLo]

I recently did a 20GB format of my remaining space for a new partition for some temp stuff and used the long format in XP Pro admin area took under an hour. Can't see 40GB being much more than an hour forbid a whole freaking day- sounds odd...

Exactly, I did stop it after it went up all day.

ANd now I can see the drive in BIOS, and in Device manager, but not in the Admin Tools or "My Computer".....[window]

Thanks

 

[MichaelM]

get hold of a boot disk and partition and format it using fdisk and format. Also, Seagate has a free program called disk wizard that can help partition and format drives for you. (www.seagate.com) It will work in windows or it can make a boot disk for you.

 

[Ed Dixon]

As a general rule, this process should take less than an hour. On many reasonable speed PCs it would take maybe 5-15 min.

There is a great software package called BootIt NG from www. terabyteunlimited. It offers lots of boot option and has lots of options for drive formating, copying, moving etc. Costs about $30.

Ed

 

[ViLo]

Thanks guys,I found out that I need the SP1 to be able to install SATA drives correctly.

Thanks again.

 

[muskgrave]

this may not suit your particular need..but sometimes a hard drive that "gets around" gets junked up and you need to not only format but also run fdisk /mbr on it to clear the master boot record.

dlv

 

[ViLo]

this may not suit your particular need..but sometimes a hard drive that "gets around" gets junked up and you need to not only format but also run fdisk /mbr on it to clear the master boot record.

dlv

Thanks