reformatting a SATA drive

[roscoe46]

I just put together my new computer & Sunday was trying to load
XP Pro. I got up to the formatt screen & hit enter & then it stalled;
Went back & tried again using quick formatt, got up to 75 % & it
stalled again.
I dropped it off yesterday to a local tech that I've used before & it
did the same thing with him. He used my XP Pro disc & also his XP Pro
disc also getting close but no cigar; still having stalls and / or file
problems.
He told me yesterday evening zero/nuke the hard drive today & do a
complete new reformatt & get it going for me.
Has anyone here ever had this same or similar experience happen to
them; if so how did you get it straightened out? Is there some type
of tool or utility disc I could buy & use if I may need to reformatt in
the future.
I may be ready to try Vista in a couple of months; friend of mine has
it & says he really likes it.
Anyway, any comments or help will be appreciated.

Thanks,
roscoe46 AKA Alfred

[shyster]

Well I have not had this particular problem, but a good thing to always do with a new hard drive is to test it.

If you hard drive is a western digital they have tools on their website that allow you to run tests from a boot floppy or disk that you make. If you run the write ones or zeros test to the entire drive, that will fundamentally clear it, and if it fails to finish writing them perhaps you have a bad drive and might need to RMA it.

If you do not have a western digital I believe other hard drive makers have similar tools on there websites.

[roscoe46]

Well, some good news & a little bad news on this; good news, the
computer is up & running, loaded Crysis last night & it is running
great.
Bad news ?? I'm going to call Western Digital today & see if they
will offer me any assistance on this drive. It was given to me by a
friend who lives out of state; I'm in Texas; all I had to pay was the
shipping to get it here to my home. I'm keeping my fingers crossed
in hope that WD will help me out so that I don't wind up having
another paperweight around here with the other clutter.
I also checked at my local Best Buy & they've got the WD
"Green Series" drives & I think it was a 500 gig SATA I saw there
for $103.00 I think. I'll probably be checking this out later this week &
hopefully they'll work properly & I can start working some
of the little bugs out of this thing.

roscoe46 AKA Alfred

[Lerxt]

The drive could definitely have problems - the WD software is pretty good (albeit slow) at analysing the drive.

Has your BIOS been updated? Sometimes the BIOS may not be able to access beyond a certain disc size (which I think is determined by cylinders or something in that vein) and thus you need to update it to handle larger drives.

If the HDD had a bad sector, it would skip past it.

For other tools, Partition Magic has been good to me too. It's faster than the WD tools, but won't give you to diagnostics you might need to contact WD support.