I have a 40gig Maxtor drive 7200 rpm. I am having difficulties formatting the whole drive using Disk Management. I have tried many different variations, but basically where I am at is that I have been able to create a 10 gig system partition and get Win2k running on it. I am able to create one or more partitions in the remaining 30 gig, but the only one of those partitions I was able to format was a 5 gig partition immediate following the primary. All my other experiments resulted in the message "The format failed to complete successfully."

I finally figured something was wrong with the drive and I went to maxtor.com and dowloaded PowerMax and did all tests plus a low level format. All tests plus format passed with flying colors. Is there a problem in Win2k with accessing this size drive? I have searched around but found nothing although I have seen several other people report the same error message while formatting.

epodietz - there should be absolutely no problem with a functioning 40GB
drive. If there are no special conditions (like a 3rd party boot
manager) you should be able in Disk Management, right behind the 10GB
Primary Partition, to create a 30GB Extended Partition covering the
remaining unallocated space, then within that Extended Partition create
one or more Logical Partitions of whatever sizes you wish, and which you
can then format as you wish and name (D:, E:, etc) as you wish.

I'm trying to recall whether there are other steps, like needing to
"commit changes", that should be done between the multiple logical
partition creation/format steps above. You might try that.

If this is what you have done, and the Maxtor disk analysis utility
reports no problems, then you need to call Maxtor tech support for a
conversation. They're pretty good about replacing iffy drives, and they
might have another diagnostic you could use too.

epodietz wrote:

> I have a 40gig Maxtor drive 7200 rpm. I am having difficulties formatting the whole drive using Disk Management. I have tried many different variations, but basically where I am at is that I have been able to create a 10 gig system partition and get Win2k running on it. I am able to create one or more partitions in the remaining 30 gig, but the only one of those partitions I was able to format was a 5 gig partition immediate following the primary. All my other experiments resulted in the message "The format failed to complete successfully."
>
> I finally figured something was wrong with the drive and I went to maxtor.com and dowloaded PowerMax and did all tests plus a low level format. All tests plus format passed with flying colors. Is there a problem in Win2k with accessing this size drive? I have searched around but found nothing although I have seen several other people report the same error message while formatting.