A bad hard drive?

[Alfred Kaufmann]

I had my Vista Home Premium 64bit running on a stripped raid setup
using two Samsung 80GB drives. I was getting lots of odd behavior and
file corruption so I replaced both hard drives and my system is
running very smooth right now.

I decided to use a Seagate DOS utility to check out the Samsung drives
and both passed the long read test. However when I started up Vista
to format and use these hard drives I ran into a problem. Vista
showed the one drive as "not initialized" and there is no way I can
see to initialize this drive. Is there a way to initlialize this
drive or should I send it for replacement?

Also does anyone know if Samgsung provides a DOS utility for checking
out their hard drives?

The second drive seems fine and is formatting as I type.

Al

 

[Alfred Kaufmann]

I did find a Samsung Hard Drive utility to check out this drive and it
reports my hard drive has NO errors. I still have no idea how to
initialize this drive.

Al

 

[Alfred Kaufmann]

To continue... I did used the Samsung utility to do a low level
format on this hard thinking that if I installed a new hard drive the
Microsoft wizard would automatically initialize this drive. No such
luck!

I looked at the help instructions again and they read. "right-click
the disk you want to initialize and then click initialize disk" You
can right-click all day and that initialize disk option will not show
up! It was only by accident that I right-clicked on the box next to
the box showing the hard drive and this Initialize option showed up.

I thought that Microsoft programmers would follow certain standards
with their menus so that things are easy to find, like select the
disk, click on the ACTION menu and you should see all the possible
actions you can take. You should not have to search around with your
mouse in a window like some idiot looking for the right spot to click!

Ak