Formatting errors

[Captain John Miller]

I have a few external drives, sadly they are all but full except for one partition of this one drive. The drive is a normal HDD inside an enclosure and has an external power source and connects to the pc VIA USB 2.0. The specific drive is SATA originally and 300gb give or take, it has 3 active partitions of about 100gb. iirc its a seagate, but it could also be on my my maxtor drives.

I tried to save some stuff to it today, it wont save jack it will copy then freeze up.

So i go into disk mgnmt and delete the partition and format it, it slowly works its way to 100% then an error comes up that its failed to format and then everything freezes.

I dunno wtf is wrong with it, the rest of the partitions work fine and I can access them with no issues.

I dont get it.. Should I run say the windows xp disc in startup and try formatting it from there instead of dsk mngmt?

Unless the HDD is failing I dont understand wtf is wrong. Never gave me issues before but I never used this part of the partition for anything iirc.

[Leomhann]

Does it make any kind of weird noise?

[Captain John Miller]

Nope, sounds just fine. Its running right now formatting again, i thought maybe if i lowered the partition size by 2gb for the heck of it just to see. Its at 16% and moving REALLY slow.

I dont think anything is loose inside the enclosure otherwise it wouldnt work.

[Captain John Miller]

Ok the exact error is just "format did not complete successfully"

[Leomhann]

TBH it sounds like the drive went bad. But I'd def get a 2nd opinion.

[Captain John Miller]

Yea, probably bad sector in the drive..

We shall see tho..

[Guy Montag]

Go to the manufacturer's site and download the diagnostic tools for your HD, no guessing that way.

Hmmm, I feel like I've written this response recently...

[Captain John Miller]

I did, maxtors maxblast is pretty worthless.

Im kinda annoyed anyways, accidentally clicked the wrong thing and deleted a partition I wanted.. Now I deleted all partitions and am formatting but imho I think the drives shot. I hope if it ever does finish formatting I will be able to recover the date or at least be able to use the HDD. If nothing else I think the drives shot..

If not bestbuy has a nice 320gb WD portable on sale for 100 bucks i might get.

[Captain John Miller]

Okay the drive is shot im pretty sure.

It took over an hour to format and at the end said "drive could not be formatted" and froze up..

FARK.. Now, Q is can I recover the data...

[Captain John Miller]

Well, cannot format it, cannot recover data. Time to buy a new HDD, sucks tho b/c I lost some semi important data.

[Buglunch]

There should be a shop in your town that recovers
data from FUBARed drives; not saying it can be done in every case.

[Captain John Miller]

There should be a shop in your town that recovers
data from FUBARed drives; not saying it can be done in every case.
Ill have to see about that..

[Captain John Miller]

FWIW even after trying to format like 3x and deleting all partitions easues (sp) file recovery found it all..