Drive wont format - any other formating utilities anyone?

[adamyoung]

I've got a couple of the same machines with hard drives that all refuse to format despite working up until i attempted to wipe them before a software rebuild.

 

Anyone know any floppy based formating tools (other that windows FORMAT) that i could try?

[ChrisH]

GDISK that comes with ghost (or at least used to) is good.

[krisd32]

have u tried using fdisk to clear all partitions off the disk and then recreate and format.

may not work but there shouldn't be any reason that windows shouldn't format unless the disk is capputt.

 

Kris

[indie]

What you need is Darik's Boot and Nuke

 

Great free utility that completely trashes a drive, it can be set to do a 35 round wipe or just a simple wipe. It's never failed me!

 

Get it here!

[gcheeseman]

Go to the drive manufacturers website and download their (probably floppy based) drive repair and testing software.

 

BUT ...

 

With new drives so cheap, and with the potential for persistent drive failures in the future, isn't it cheaper to just junk the old ones?

[Geoff]

You could also try a Linux LiveCD. If it can't format it atleast it will give you a sensible error message as to whats going wrong.

[bossman]

Have you tried efdisk, yes you heard me right not fdisk but efdisk very powerful formatting tool not free but about 12£, get it here http://www.exefind.com/MasterBooter-P11034.html

 

MasterBooter is a boot manager which can be used to install and maintain more operating systems on a PC. System names, passwords are customizable. You can set the delay time, default system and beeping. It also has FAT hiding support, partition protecting from unauthorized access and customizable menu colors. Supports nearly all known operating systems, like Win9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003, DOS, Linux, OS/2, BeOS, Solaris, FreeBSD and more. A utility called EFDISK is included to create more primary partitions on one harddisk. Both utilities are ready for handling huge harddisks, above 8 gigabytes. A partition table and boot sector rescue utility is also included. Documentation is available in English and Hungarian, more can be downloaded from the homepage.

[SimpleSi]

Don't use a LiveCD - Linux formatters are not reliable in formatting FAT/NTFS partitions. (or they weren't 3 months ago anyway)

 

(And they don't give reliable error messages - they can easily pretend to have done it sucessfully but haven't)

 

regards

 

Simon

[Joedetic]

I always found a couple of old partition magic 5 boot floppies with that lovely GUI it's got were quite successful.

 

I've lost them though :'(

[Geoff]

Don't use a LiveCD - Linux formatters are not reliable in formatting FAT/NTFS partitions. (or they weren't 3 months ago anyway)

 

(And they don't give reliable error messages - they can easily pretend to have done it sucessfully but haven't)

 

 

That's certainly true for NTFS. It's not the case for FAT32. I suggest you repartition and format the drive as FAT32. You will get sane error messages.

 

Ultra paranoid people can format it with a native Linux filesystem though.

 

If you do format it with FAT32 and install WinXP on it you can use the 'convert' command to turn it into NTFS without any major hassle.

[plexer]

I use AEFdisk very good program that can delete a partition, create a partition or multiples ones and format them very fast.

 

http://www.aefdisk.com/

 

Ben

[CyberNerd]

Don't use a LiveCD - Linux formatters are not reliable in formatting FAT/NTFS partitions. (or they weren't 3 months ago anyway)

 

If you experienced error you should

email the development team at:[email protected] and tell us which version of the driver you are using, which Linux version (uname -a) and which version of NTFS (Win NT, 2K, XP, 2K3 or Vista). Additionally, if there are any NTFS messages in /var/log/messages then please include them.

 

They are currently unaware of any reliability problems so it would be more helpful to get them to fix it rather than post FUD, the forums are quite helpful and aren't exactly packed with horror stories.

[indie]

Has no one tried DBAN? It really is good, it's never failed me in formatting a drive!

[SimpleSi]

@geoff and Cybernerd

 

Could I refer you to this thread

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1397

 

(Starting at 6th post)

 

where you can see my problems with partitioning and formatting FAT32 partitions using a varity of distributions on 2 different computers.

 

@Cybernerd

I apolgise for lambasting Linux's ability to format NTFS - I actually thought that it was a well known fact that Linux cannot fully interact with NTFS partitions. Its good to know that all the problems have been fixed.

 

When I was having my difficulties I came to the conclusion that better people than me (in both Linux and Windows camps) were agreed that DOS utilities should be used to format DOS/Windows partitions and Linux for Linux type partitions.

 

regards

 

Simon

[crc-ict]

...Both utilities are ready for handling huge harddisks, above 8 gigabytes...

 

Wow! The size! The power!

 

How old is this tool? It's been a while since an 8Gb hard disk was considered 'huge'. 80Gb seems puny these days.

 

Sorry, just made me laugh!