320gb Sata wont format?

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zep867

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Hey guys-

I'm trying to add a new 320 data drive to my machine to replace the dying 160gb ide thats in there currently.

I tryed just doing a fresh install with the 320 in and had removed the 160. Took forever then gave me a message about the disk was unable to format, it may be damaged, etc~

Now normally, I'd say ok... bad drive. However this is a brand new 320 gb sata 300 Seagate drive. And, I got the same message with that last sata hd I tryed to format with this machine.

with the last one, I had tryed quite a few different things with no avail. Even tryed creating a single drive raid 0 array. Still didn't work. At that point I assumed it to be a bad drive and returned it.

But at this point, I find it unlikely to get 2 faulty sata drives in a row.

I've tried running through a windows install for the format, doesn't work. I tried booting to windows from the IDE drive and using windows to format the 320, didn't work. Took about 4 hours, then gave another cannot format the drive message.

I reset bios, no go. I made sure sata support was enabled and made sure that the sata spread spectrum was disabled. Still no go.

I even made sure all my mobo drivers were up to date, even though thats a windows solution and would have no effect on a windows install boot disk.

I'mplanning to take it to my friends shop to try formatting it on a different machine, but at the this point I'm somewhat stumped.

What do you guys think? Just another Bad Drive? Bad Sata controller on the mb?
 
Well, by default it uses Windows drivers if your only using Sata. The only time it wouldnt have necessary drivers is if your using a RAID array.

But yea, I did.
 
My Raptor wouldn't format when I bought it, I had to load the SATA drivers on the Windows install (the part where it says Press F6 to blah blah), and then it worked.
 
Go to Seagate's website and get a formatting utility and burn it to a disc, and format it that way.
 
make a DOS boot disk and put on FDISK. use that to create the drive partition (but don't format with Fdisk)

When in the Windows install, do a quick format, instead of a full format
 
Yea that still didnt do it.

I did however throw it (not literally) into my buddy's machine and formatted it in that without a problem.

So, at least I know it isnt the drive.

Time to buy a new mb with a better sata controller.
 
You can just get a cheap SATA controller card and stick it in a PCI slot, they're pretty cheap.
 
Yea, I know but I'm currently using an older nf2, socket a, etc~ old school stuff. Worked fine up until now.

But I've been planning to bump a bit faster for a while.
 
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