Hard drive won't format..

[s37d]

Hi, i have a hard drive issue. Got this hard drive recently from a friend, it's a couple years old but has never been used, so basically new. It's a Western Digital 160gb SATA.

I plugged it into my computer in addition to my 2 other hard drives, one which is a 120gb peripheral, and the other which is a 160gb SATA. the 120 is the master which I boot from. Anyway, I plugged the HD into the open sata slot and booted up. It recognized it in explorer, but I couldn't access it. It said I needed to format it, so I tried to format it through explorer...couldn't. I then opened up disk management from "my computer">"manage", and tried to format it through there...couldn't. I then disabled all other hard drives and booted from a windows XP cd. I tried to format it through the win xp cd but yet again, it didn't work.

All 3 times trying to reformat it it just didn't go past 0%. It recognizes the drive but doesn't transfer any data, just sits at 0%. I tried switching the sata cable out for another new, didn't help. Also, even though I was under the impression that jumpers weren't necessary for most sata setups, I tried setting the jumper on the HD from master(jumper on far right) to slave(no jumper)...didn't do anything.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

Here's the screen from win xp cd format...won't go past 0%...gave it 5-10 min to move:

 

[eyeCpc]

First off a brand new drive lacks any partition on it to format. In the Disk Management tool or with another drive tool you create the new single or multiple partitions on the drive to see those formatted.

You can't format hard drives through Windows Explorer. Only floppy disks can be formatted seeing the option in the right click menu.

As far as seeing jumpers on a WD sata drive that would be on a Sata I not Sata II type disk there. Either at the default or jumper being removed completely insures that all drive modes are enabled. The information seen in WD's FaQ/knowledge base on jumper settings for the Sata I type drives are seen at Answer

 

[s37d]

Alright well I guess the partition that I created in windows disk management was conflicting with the xp cd formatting or something. I just went to disk management, deleted the partition, made a new one and then quick formatted it from there. That worked. Thanks