New hard drive format problem

[Scoobs]

Hi all,

I seem to have a problem with a new hard drive i've installed. :(

My Pc is running vista and is fairly new.

I've installed a second internal Sata hard drive.

Booted up windows, all was ok.

Went into Computer management then into Storage and Disk management.

The new drive was shown there. I followed the instructions and the disk was intialised and then onto the new disk wizard which took me through the format.

All the settings were as default, NTFS etc. and then it started to format.

The problem is that it seems to have hung at 54% for over 2 hours.

Any ideas?

Cheers

[Fut]

Reboot and try it again.

Happened to me on the odd occasion and that's what I did.

[troutfisher]

I had the same problem it turned out the drive was faulty.Have a couple of goes and if still does it take it back

[Scoobs]

Cheers guys. I'll try the reboot, fingers crossed.

[Bobster]

make sure everything is connected :)

[basroil]

And make sure iTunes is not on.... damn thing likes to access drives it shouldn't be looking at..

[MaxxuM]

And make sure iTunes is not on.... damn thing likes to access drives it shouldn't be looking at..

Can you provide some information on this phenomenon?

When an NTFS partition is being formatted it cannot be accessed by another process. Moreover, if the drive was not formatted it would not be accessible by iTune (does not have the ability to access unformatted or unknown) drive partitions. In addition, iTunes (on a PC) does not access area's not assigned to the media folder location - though services iTune's uses do, but not for cataloging. They are meant for detection and location of drives, namely iPod's, shared resources (libraries and folders) and the security service for shared resources.

Windows Media Player however is a different creature all together. It can, and does, index via Vista's own services (search). Akin to iTune's on OS X where iTunes uses the OS own features to index and search all drives. However, again, the OS would not allow this indexing to occur on a drive that has not been formatted.

What is FAR more likely is one of these issues:

1) Power fluctuation caused a CRC error in formatting. Re-boot, Re-partitioning and re-formatting usually solves this issue.

2) Bad drive or controller. Buy another hard drive.

3) Service crashed in MMC (namely virtual disk service). See #1 for solution. This has other implications like bad CRC on drive.

4) Loose cable. Check them!

5) Bent or broken SATA connection.

6) Bad power [supply].

7) Virus or other malware interrupting the process or trying to manipulate something in memory (causing crash or freeze of services).

8) Anti-Virus software set at very high security level will disallow certain high level functions - this is doubtful since it already began formatting, but this may still occur.

9) Bad vista driver (ATA/ATAPI) or bad controller.

10) Poorly grounded house/computer. I've seen some REALLY strange things happen when a house is improperly grounded. Like magically moving folders (jump from one folder to another) or devices that turn off and on at will.

I really don't understand why you always must blame Apple. It's kinda bizarre really - did Steve Jobs run over your puppy or something? ;):D

[basroil]

Can you provide some information on this phenomenon?

When an NTFS partition is being formatted it cannot be accessed by another process. Moreover, if the drive was not formatted it would not be accessible by iTune (does not have the ability to access unformatted or unknown) drive partitions. In addition, iTunes (on a PC) does not access area's not assigned to the media folder location - though services iTune's uses do, but not for cataloging. They are meant for detection and location of drives, namely iPod's, shared resources (libraries and folders) and the security service for shared resources.

Windows Media Player however is a different creature all together. It can, and does, index via Vista's own services (search). Akin to iTune's on OS X where iTunes uses the OS own features to index and search all drives. However, again, the OS would not allow this indexing to occur on a drive that has not been formatted.

What is FAR more likely is one of these issues:

1) Power fluctuation caused a CRC error in formatting. Re-boot, Re-partitioning and re-formatting usually solves this issue.

2) Bad drive or controller. Buy another hard drive.

3) Service crashed in MMC (namely virtual disk service). See #1 for solution. This has other implications like bad CRC on drive.

4) Loose cable. Check them!

5) Bent or broken SATA connection.

6) Bad power [supply].

7) Virus or other malware interrupting the process or trying to manipulate something in memory (causing crash or freeze of services).

8) Anti-Virus software set at very high security level will disallow certain high level functions - this is doubtful since it already began formatting, but this may still occur.

9) Bad vista driver (ATA/ATAPI) or bad controller.

10) Poorly grounded house/computer. I've seen some REALLY strange things happen when a house is improperly grounded. Like magically moving folders (jump from one folder to another) or devices that turn off and on at will.

I really don't understand why you always must blame Apple. It's kinda bizarre really - did Steve Jobs run over your puppy or something? ;):D

All I know is that iTunes being on and drives formatting were not good in my experience. I don't care about what should happen or should not happen, only about what has happened to me personally. And if turning off iTunes solved my issue (killing it and helper), then I'm throwing it out there like a good poster. OP can judge each suggestion as he pleases. I've never had issues with WMP, but then again, I forcefully removed everything related to it that I possibly could without affecting the OS, so I wouldn't know anything about it.

[MaxxuM]

You may want to check your OS and hardware then. I've formatted hundreds of drives while iTune's was running (even HD movies) with no issues while at work & home. I even Ghosted 50 E5500's in the past two days while iTunes was running on the Ghost Cast Server (laptop) and didn't see any issues.