Unable to Format More Than 10% of a Raid 0 Set

[Stewart Berman]

A8N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
Windows XP SP2 With All Critical Updates

I have two 500GB SATA drives attached to an NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Southbridge Raid controller.

I have enabled the Raid controller in the BIOS and selected STRIPPED (Raid 0).

I booted the system and Disk Management sees a single 931.52 GB drive. I tried to format it and
formatting just seems to stop at 10%. the drive activity light goes out. There aren't any error
messages.

I previously had the drives setup as a mirrored set (Raid 1) and that formatted fine so I don't
think it is a problem with the drives.

Do I need to use a special program to format a Raid 0 set?

 

[DL]

You deleted the partition first, then created a new one?

 

[Stewart Berman]

First I broke the mirror by deleting the array. When I rebooted I could not see the drives at all
because I forgot to disable the raid option for the drives in the BIOS. So I did that and rebooted.
At that point I had two drives with identical partitions (the results of the mirroring). I deleted
all of the logical partitions and the extended partition from drives. They were totally
unallocated.

I then enabled raid support for the drives and selected STRIPPED (Raid 0) for the mode and rebuilt
the array. When I rebooted Windows said the hardware changed so much on the machine that I had to
reactivate it. It also said I had a new drive.

(Activation was a pain as it prompts before you login and my firewall would not let the activation
model access the network. I had to hit the remind me later button and then reactivate after I
logged in and the firewall could ask for permission to all the activation model to access the
network.)

I then created a single basic primary partition on the drive and tried to format it. I did it a few
times and each time it stopped at the 10% point. Finally, I gave up and did a quick format.

I am now in the process of restoring 700 GB of files from the backup drives.

 

[DL]

Well at least its OK now;
When I've had similar problems I've either used the hd manu utility to
check/repair the hd, or on another occassion used a bootable floppy utility
from bootdisk.com to ensure the hd was clean.