formatting takes forever

perthy wrote:
>

Im re-formatting xp home on a 40gb hard drive. It was

> stuck on 7% for an hour. Now it's on 8% for almost an
> hour. What could the problem be?
>
I don't say that this is your problem, but I had that on a
hard drive that was about to die. It never failed
completely, but formatting or Spinwrite just ran for ever.

Cheers,

Cliff


Barzoomian the Martian - http://barzoomian.blogspot.com

Hi,

Possibly a failing drive. Quit the installation, boot the system with a
diagnostic disk and test the drive. These utilities are generally free to
download from the drive manufacturer, and should give you an idea of the
state of the drive. Watch for SMART errors as well, as these are rarely
wrong. If it seems ok, try instead to delete the existing system partition
and then create a new one from the free space (since you are formatting
anyways, this step will not lose anything that you wouldn't have lost by
formatting). Then choose the quick format option.

Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone
www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

"perthy" wrote in message
news:

Im re-formatting xp home on a 40gb hard drive. It was stuck on 7% for an
hour. Now it's on 8% for almost an hour. What could the problem be?