Problem formatting Hitachi hard disks

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paulie128

New Member
Hello everone. I really hope you can help me with this because it is driving me insane!

I recently bought two Hitachi 7k250 SATA drives (80gb) which I connected to my Athlon XP nforce 2 system (based around a Leadtek WinFast K7nCR18D PRO motherboard) via a SiL 3112 2-channel Raid contoller.

Everything went fine. The 3112 installed fine, I set up a striped RAId array, Windows booted happily. Everthing checked out. So I went to the device manager to intialise and format the drives. This is where the problems started.

Although Windows could see the new drive, let me intialise it, but whe I tired to partition it and format it, it failed: It would get to 99% and fail. The same happened using format command at the command prompt. Worried, I deleted the RAID array and tried to format each disk separetly. Both failed in exactly the same way several times.

I downloaded Hitachi disk checking utility which said both disks were fine, so I am now stumped. My Windows XP is completely up to date as are all my drivers (especially 3112 and BIOS on my Leadtek WinFast K7nCR18D PRO motherboard).

Why can I not format these disks? I am at my wits end since hours of trawling forums has not helped.
Any ideas? Would using another hard disk utility, e.g. Disk Genius or Partition Magic 8, help (although i'd rather not spend the money)?

All responses will be greatly appreciated.
 
Just making sure, did you move the jumper settings from the factory default? Next thing you can try is formatting under dos. Boot disk etc.
 
Paulie,i not sure what the problem is,but in my opinion Yes, you should try using partition magic.i always use this to format a drive.i have the proggie on 2 floppies.i first just connect the drive to be formated tothe MASTER by itself and put the #1 P.M. floppy in so to boot to it.From there it will ask to put in the #2 floppy and then it comes up to ask how you like to format it.
I use it for 2 reasons:it allows me to fromat FAT32 instead of NTFS.(dONT ASK,I SOMETIMES PREFER IT.)And aslo its formating is almost instantanious.
And it is easy and always works.
After you complete the format just shut off the puter and unhook the drive.it will be all ready to initialize and assign drive letters and such in Windows Disk Management.Good Luck!
Lerch
 
Trizoy said:
Just making sure, did you move the jumper settings from the factory default? Next thing you can try is formatting under dos. Boot disk etc.
Click to expand...
Trizoy,

I was under the impression that SATA disks had no jumpers? I have not tried DOS but I will give it a go, although I suspect it will fail as well.

I have been in touch with Hitachi support but they have not got back to me yet.
 
lerch said:
Paulie,i not sure what the problem is,but in my opinion Yes, you should try using partition magic.i always use this to format a drive.i have the proggie on 2 floppies.i first just connect the drive to be formated tothe MASTER by itself and put the #1 P.M. floppy in so to boot to it.From there it will ask to put in the #2 floppy and then it comes up to ask how you like to format it.
I use it for 2 reasons:it allows me to fromat FAT32 instead of NTFS.(dONT ASK,I SOMETIMES PREFER IT.)And aslo its formating is almost instantanious.
And it is easy and always works.
After you complete the format just shut off the puter and unhook the drive.it will be all ready to initialize and assign drive letters and such in Windows Disk Management.Good Luck!
Lerch
Click to expand...
Lerch,

I really have no idea what the problem is - after two days trying to resolve it I am close to giving up and just putting it down as one of those things.

I tried Partition Magic - which is undoubtedly a fine piece of software - but it failed as well and for the same reason, reporting an unknown error #518 (or some similar number).

Still then at a complete loss.
 
You may be right.

Hitachi customer support have just got back to me and told me to "Use the Erase Disk utility from our Drive Fitness Test program to completely wipe the drive, restoring it to manufacturing state."

Somehow I knew they were going to say that!

I will give it a go and report back on what happens.
 
Guys,

I think we're talking SATA here so you might be interested to know I've got the exact same error on a sil 3112 pci controller in a abit KT7A (via KT133) mobo mirroring 2 seagate 80gb 7200.8 drives.

Initially even my RAID bios was unusuable before I moved the card 1 pci slot along. I had assumed it was a pci irq sharing issue but now when the format gets to near 100% - bang - "XP cannot use drive" error...

I've vaguely remember an issue I sorted long ago with a video card/ATA driver card (I think - can't quite remember) so I'm going to try and swap out the the other two cards (a 3com 10/100 network and nvidia TNT2) and see if thats the problem. Otherwise maybe we're talking mobo chipset conflicts so I'll try it in an old Intel P2 system I've got.

Lastly I've also got an oboard asus sil 3112 in another machine so I'll try to prove the two disks are OK there - if you get some results sooner then me please post them up as it might save me a little effort :)
 
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