sata hard drive formatting issue in XP

[sirhc]

Just received my parts for my new build, got it all assembled and set the bios up? went to install XP and it needed to format my 500gb sata hard drive and after 40 minutes it came back saying it could not do it .. to full or damaged or?? Bad hard drive? That would suck another 3 week wait! Any ideas? I did not use the f6 because the bios saw my hard drive???

[arekieh]

Hey man,
Dont give up, before you do try formatting with a live linux cd like gparted. Its basically a linux kernel thats solely for editing partitions and formatting drives. Handy program.
GParted -- Welcome

If that doesnt work, i would send the drive in for an RMA
Good luck

[Squeetard]

Did you set your sata as IDE and not RAID in the bios?

[enaberif]

Did you do a full format or a quick format?

Full format does a check of the disk to confirm everything is good. If this fails then generally there is a problem with the drive.

[sirhc]

I will confirm but pretty sure it was set as raid and not ide and did the full not the quick .... ordered from NCIX will local Computer stores replace the drive for me or does it have to go back to NCIX?

[Tazer-[X]]

Well, you could always forget about all the neato little apps and stuff and go back to basic, get a win98 start up disk. sounds strange, but, its bout the best tool ive ever had to scramble for.

[sirhc]

in the bios it says "sata ahci" => should this be enabled or disabled when plan is to use XP?

also "sata port 0-3 native mode" => should this B enabled or disabled?

I disabled the serial and parralel ports

what about the onboard IDE controller?

The hard drive shows up under IDE channel 0 master and the CDROM shows up under IDE channel 1 master ... ??

Any ideas as to what they should show as?

[sirhc]

in the bios it says "sata ahci" => should this be enabled or disabled when plan is to use XP?

also "sata port 0-3 native mode" => should this B enabled or disabled?
Originally I had these set to disabled because I read somewhere that XP has a problem with sata drives and the bios detected both my DVD rom and HD, I tried switching to AHCI and enabled and my bios did not find my harddrive and DVD rom?

The problem was that XP could not format my 500 GB HD ... I was only using a single partition "C" I am guessing it is a bad hard drive .... how can I be sure?

[arekieh]

As i said, run gparted
and try formatting it with it. Gparted has fix many "ruined" drives for me

[Mr. Gruntsworthy]

he said that it was set to RAID.