frankiee

An old harddrive got reformat
Trying to rocover allocation unit" came up
Has been going for 3 hours and only at 1058***
Some one told me that the longer it runs the more likely it is garbage.
Its a 6 gig
Should I just scrap it now or let it run all nite.

PC eye

3hrs. and hung? The drive could very well be too far gone or the tool used is the problem. What are you using to reformat the drive with for what OS?

frankiee

I am using a 98 floppy bootdisk
The file format that I was formating was NtFS
It is not hung all the time
It is slow, very slow
Does that mean I have a lot of bad sectors
Should I just toss the drive now
I dont want to waste my time

The_Other_One

If you can find a low level format utility(zero write) you may be able to correct those bad sectors. I think I have one bookmarked in my links page, but it's a windows utility. I assume you need a dos based one?

I had some older one by Seagate... I don't know if it'll be around their site anymore.

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PC eye

That explains the lengthy time. You can't format an NTFS partition with a dos boot disk. The most you could accomplish there is to delete the current partition and create a new Fat32 with fdisk. For a quick wipe of the drive there by floppy Active Killdisk has a freeware version that writes binary zeros to the intended hard drive depite the OS on it. http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

The_Other_One

You can't format an NTFS in dos, period. DOS won't even assign a drive letter for an NTFS partition. The only way to format a drive is by using FAT. However, you must first partition the drive. fdisk will see the NTFS partition, but the file system is "Unknown"

__________________
Desktop * Athlon X2 4200 | 2G RAM | 160G HD | 7600GT
Laptop1 * C2D T5550 | 3G RAM | 120G HD | Intel x3100
Laptop2 * C2D T5250 | 2G RAM | 160G HD | Intel x3100

PC eye

That's what I just said. The only access possible to an NTFS partition when booted from a 98 floppy is called NT4Dos. That simply allows you access and nothing else. Regardless of running 98, 98SE, ME, 2K, XP, Vista, or Linux the one partitioning tool that proves itself worthwhile every time is free. It helps to have a cd writer however. http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...kage_id=173828

The Gnome Partition Editor known as GParted will clean off whatever partition is already on the drive and even create a Fat32 primary if not going with NTFS or VFat. For 98 you would simply boot with the 98 floppy later to use the format.com tool for a complete Fat32 format of a new primary.

The_Other_One

You said you can't format NTFS in DOS, refering to the lengthy time required for the above format...

__________________
Desktop * Athlon X2 4200 | 2G RAM | 160G HD | 7600GT
Laptop1 * C2D T5550 | 3G RAM | 120G HD | Intel x3100
Laptop2 * C2D T5250 | 2G RAM | 160G HD | Intel x3100

PC eye

You can't! With GParted you remove the NTFS partition currently on the drive and create a new Fat32 type partition. From the 98 floppy you then use the format.com tool to format the newly created Fat32 replacement. GParted can create as well as remove the varying partition types.

The_Other_One

I don't feel like arguing tonight...

This is the program I was refering to. It's a bit of a pain to use because all info must be entered manually(unless you do happen to have one of the pre-entered seagate drives) but I know it works. Do this, then a regular format. Typically, this will correct the bad sectors, but it is not guaranteed.

http://br.geocities.com/downloads_pc...o/sgatfmt4.htm
http://br.geocities.com/downloads_pc...s/sgatfmt4.zip

__________________
Desktop * Athlon X2 4200 | 2G RAM | 160G HD | 7600GT
Laptop1 * C2D T5550 | 3G RAM | 120G HD | Intel x3100
Laptop2 * C2D T5250 | 2G RAM | 160G HD | Intel x3100