Windows won't format!
 

I am having serious problems with my sisters machine. I've managed to get the Master set up as the hard drive and DVD as slave, but when I try and delete a partition, it tells me all of a sudden the hard drive can't be picked up. When I try and format the drive it hangs at 0%, and if I carry on with the boot process it tells me it can't find the operating system, which is because it's not even been installed, the format hung at 0% and I had to restart.
I am using the hard drive from my machine, having swapped them around, and it worked fine on mine before this.

Any suggestions?

Try setting BOTH your DVD and your hard drive at "cable select" and see if that helps.

Nope.

And besides, I tried to reformat on my machine as well, which obviously has a different DVD drive, and I had the same problem.

This is what's happening, and it also hangs at 0% during the format as well.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...trouble003.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...trouble004.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...trouble005.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...trouble006.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...trouble007.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...trouble008.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...trouble009.jpg

Try going into the Recovery Console and using diskpart to delete the partition.

Just tried. It just sticks at PLEASE WAIT after pressing L to delete it.

Can you try putting the Hard Disk and the DVD Drive on separate IDE Channels?

There's only two slots on the mobo - floppy and another one for the DVD and hard drive. And besides I tried it on my PC, with no luck.

Double Post:
OK I give up.

My last hope was to connect up both HDs, boot up with the normal one with Windows XP, and then see if I can access the one that isn't working via My Computer or something, but it appears XP needs to be installed on both to boot up properly, am I correct? It just told me it can't find an operating system during boot up when I connect both of them.

I'm going to buy a new hard drive, thankfully they arn't too expensive these days.

If you have XP Installed on one of the hard drives it should boot, make sure the HD with XP installed onto it is set as the master drive, and make sure the bios is set to boot from this drive

Well i've managed to get it the dodgy drive to run whilst Windows is running (eg as a slave drive). Strange thing is, in the disk management utility it says the drive is running fine, with no problems. I think I managed to partition, but just like before, it hangs whilst formatting. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...c/noformat.jpg

Have you tried a low level format utility from the manufacturer?
>> http://www.bootdisk.com/dostools.htm scroll to the bottom.
Or even a simple thing like fdisk?
>> Somewhere in the same page.

ust an update. Ran the Seagate diagnosis tool at bootup, ran all the tests, it told me nothing on the drive passes, some passed with errors, and the rest past with critical errors. It found hundreds of bad sectors, and when I tried to replace them all with 0's it failed on every one.

Can I officially say my HD is dead?

Also, I left the hard drive formatting over night. The progress bar moved, but when I woke up it said it cannot be formatted, and had failed. The problem is partitioning, I can delete a partition, but it will still show up, without a drive letter however, and then when I try and delete that partition it will tell me the drive failed or has disconnected. It does tell me in disk manager however the disk is fine and is healthy, although without a file system (because I can't format)

Sounds like it's dead to me, and even if you do get it working I wouldn't trust it to work for long =/

Ascendancy's right, you've got a dead disk.

I just fixed someone's box that was suffering from the same thing a few months back. Sometimes it would boot, sometimes not, sometimes it would login and sometimes not. OS would mysteriously randomly hang when they'd do anything but let it sit there, etc. I figured "reinstall," and oh was I wrong. Disk was hosed, so I priced out HDDs and had them order one. System's been running fine ever since I installed the new drive.

You could maybe try a low-level format, but you have to be careful to make sure you get the model-specific utility for your drive. Even then, I wouldn't use it for anything more than throwing in a USB box and using as portable temporary storage.

Luckily disks are pretty cheap right now, and Seagate just announced a 750GB single disk. That should be enough to keep you going for a while.