Hi There


Bought a 750 gig Hard Drive in September and haven’t had problem with it until now.

I’m about to install a fresh copy of window vista and have backed up everything that’s on the 750gig to an external HDD (no problems there), but when I’ve come to format the 750 gig Hard Drive I’ve notched that it stayed on 99% for a while and in computer management, its showing up as raw, even after the format, I’ve now deleted the partition, re-created it and get the message “the format did not complete successfully” and then get “ you need to format disk drive D: before you can use it” with the option to format which I choose but even if I try to format it, I get the message “windows was unable to complete the format”.

Even though I’ve not had any previous problems with the drive, as its worked fine, when I installed the drive when I was using Windows XP, I used partition magic to try and format the drive it and even that didn’t work.

So am I right in thinking that there’s a problem with this drive or should I try the Windows Vista Dvd and see if formats in that before I RMA it?

Btw the drive in questions is a Western Digital 750GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM Green Power

There is no need to format before installing Vista..
matter of fact its better to format during the install process.. especially
with Vista
peter

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"Smoggie" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:513a8fc611964bdc22ef0d9e8c3c038f@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

>
> Hi There
>
>
> Bought a 750 gig Hard Drive in September and haven't had problem with
> it until now.
>
> I'm about to install a fresh copy of window vista and have backed up
> everything that's on the 750gig to an external HDD (no problems there),
> but when I've come to format the 750 gig Hard Drive I've notched that it
> stayed on 99% for a while and in computer management, its showing up as
> raw, even after the format, I've now deleted the partition, re-created
> it and get the message "the format did not complete successfully" and
> then get " you need to format disk drive D: before you can use it" with
> the option to format which I choose but even if I try to format it, I
> get the message "windows was unable to complete the format".
>
> Even though I've not had any previous problems with the drive, as its
> worked fine, when I installed the drive when I was using Windows XP, I
> used partition magic to try and format the drive it and even that didn't
> work.
>
> So am I right in thinking that there's a problem with this drive or
> should I try the Windows Vista Dvd and see if formats in that before I
> RMA it?
>
> Btw the drive in questions is a Western Digital 750GB Hard Drive SATAII
> 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM Green Power
>
>
> --
> Smoggie

I get what your saying but thats not going to be my main c: drive,, I'm just wondering if its worth my time formatting the drive during the windows setup since its failed twice already.

Hi, Smoggie.

We don't see this problem much anymore, but that sounds like the symptom
that we used to see all the time when Win2K and WinXP were new and users
were trying to format their new humongous hard drives with FAT32, rather
than NTFS. Disk Management would seem to be formatting properly, all the
way to the end, and THEN would fail with that completely UNinformative error
message. :>( Disk Management could create a much larger partition, but
could format that partition as FAT32 only if it was no larger than 32 GB.
The older Win98 could format a partition as FAT32 up to about 128 GB. Other
operating systems could handle formatting much larger partitions as FAT32 -
and maybe Partition Magic could, too.

Are you trying to format it as FAT? Or FAT32? Did it come preformatted?
As FAT32? Can you format it as NTFS in Disk Management?

The good news: your new HD is probably fine. No need for RMA. ;^}

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@xxxxxx
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 7000

"Smoggie" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:513a8fc611964bdc22ef0d9e8c3c038f@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

>
> Hi There
>
>
> Bought a 750 gig Hard Drive in September and haven’t had problem with
> it until now.
>
> I’m about to install a fresh copy of window vista and have backed up
> everything that’s on the 750gig to an external HDD (no problems there),
> but when I’ve come to format the 750 gig Hard Drive I’ve notched that it
> stayed on 99% for a while and in computer management, its showing up as
> raw, even after the format, I’ve now deleted the partition, re-created
> it and get the message “the format did not complete successfully” and
> then get “ you need to format disk drive D: before you can use it” with
> the option to format which I choose but even if I try to format it, I
> get the message “windows was unable to complete the format”.
>
> Even though I’ve not had any previous problems with the drive, as its
> worked fine, when I installed the drive when I was using Windows XP, I
> used partition magic to try and format the drive it and even that didn’t
> work.
>
> So am I right in thinking that there’s a problem with this drive or
> should I try the Windows Vista Dvd and see if formats in that before I
> RMA it?
>
> Btw the drive in questions is a Western Digital 750GB Hard Drive SATAII
> 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM Green Power
>
>
> --
> Smoggie

Well hopefully (and with fingers crossed), its formatting with in Vista with no problems, what I managed to do in the end was, delete the 750gig drive with in the Vista setup, re-create it and then format it, and I never got the the error code 0x80070057 that I was getting when I just went to format it in the Vista setup.

I've reconnected the drive with Vista on and after booting up went stright into Disk Management, quick formated the 750 gig drive (as NTFS) and had no errors messages like last night, so deleted the 750 gig drive, re-created it again and this time just choose to format it normally (again NTFS and in Disk Management), so far its up to 69% and just hoping it fully formats this time instead of hanging on 99% and then brings up an error message about not being able to format the drive