Drive stops formatting half way through

[Patrick R. Judy]

Hello,

I recently bought a 250Gb hard drive and have been having a lot of
problems trying to get it formatted in Windows XP. First of all, I
read the articles concerning problems with drives over 137Gb and have
applied all of the patches from Microsoft. My PC dual boots between
Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Pro (both have the latest Service
Packs). My motherboard is the SOYO Dragon Ultra with the VIA KT333
chipset.

My drive is recognized under both OS's as 232.88Gb which I heard is
normal. I have no problems at all formatting the entire drive as one
partition with NTFS under Windows 2000. However, if I try it in XP
with NTFS, the formatting stops at 55%. There are no errors and the PC
doesn't lock up. I do notice that the hard drive light gets dim when
it gets around 54%. I've tried the controller card that came with the
drive, but that locked up my PC. I've also tried the Western Digital
Diagnostic Tools (version 11.0) and found no errors on the drive. I've
checked the drive with CHKDSK in both OS's. In 2000, there were no
errors. In XP, CHKDSK just stops. The only formatting I can do in XP
on the drive is a quick format.

This drive is just extra storage and will not contain an OS. If I
format the drive with NTFS in Windows 2000, I can still read the drive
fine in XP and save and delete things in both OS's. Will it cause a
problem down the road if I just leave the drive formatted with NTFS in
Windows 2000 and use the drive in XP? I know that NTFS is supposed to
be a little different between the two OS's. This is the wierdest
problem I have seen. I would quickly have thought the drive was faulty
if it wouldn't have formatted in Windows 2000 as well as XP, but it
was only XP that gave me the problems.

Any suggestions on this? Thanks.

Patrick

 

[Jerry]

In XP you must turn on the 48-bit LBA to see drives over 137Gb.

 

[Patrick R. Judy]

In XP you must turn on the 48-bit LBA to see drives over 137Gb.

I actually got it fixed. I had already done what you suggested with a
hotfix from Microsoft. The problem was that I hooked the drive up to a
RAID IDE port because I'm using it as a standard IDE port. I went to
SOYO's website and downloaded a newer driver for the RAID controller
and the problem was solved.

I do have one other question. I formatted the drive with NTFS and set
the bit allocation size to default. Is that the best setting if I'm
going to be capturing video to the drive?

Thanks.

Patrick