Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Formatting a hard disk

Figured I'd post this here as there are a lot of tech guys on this board.
I just bought a new 500gb external SATA HD and enclosure to expand my PVR. After apparently hooking up successfully, my PVR immediately froze upon viewing a channel, then would reboot, then freeze, then reboot again, then told me there was a problem with the drive. Now the combination I bought is one confirmed to work the my Scientific Atlanta 8300HD, so that should be fine. I hooked it up via USB to my Windows XP computer to format it there, fearing I may have not given the PVR enough time to format it. Its been 11 (yes, eleven) hours and its formatted 4% of the drive. I can hear the drive spinning, but the "clicking" noises of the drive being accessed are very sporadic, coming in brief 1 second bursts every 10 or 15 seconds. I'm assuming the drive is not functioning properly? There is no way it should possibly be taking this long to format, correct?

The drive probably would take a number of hours to format but not 11 and only get to 4%

IIRC you wouldnt even hear the drive seeking because it wouldnt be jumping around when you format it. Although I can only imagine it would take longer via USB rather than directly with SATA on the Mobo.

Thats just way too long. A quick format on windows takes minutes and a standard format should only take... well I'm not exactly sure as its been a while, but I would think not more than a couple of hours.

I expect that you have a bad drive.

Fred

Yup, something wrong here. Also, most, if not all, external drives are already formatted when you buy them. I'm wondering if you needed to do that in the first place.

Also, when you looked at the partition in XP, was it going to allow you to format as the entire 500MB? Without the right combo of service pack and drive type, XP has issues trying to create a 500MB partition.

Your best bet may be to claim it was DOA, which it might have been, and try another. Try to access it first before deciding to format it.

Just reread. I now see you are formatting for use with a PVR. Is the PVR actually doing the formatting? If so, I'm in totally unfamiliar territory and ignore what I said above.

I did a similar thing for a Tivo HD and external HDD. I think you need to make sure that the HDD is formatted first. Just hook it up to a PC and just to an NTFS format. Then it should be recognizable to the PVR and let the PVR reformat it.

To clarify a few things.

-It was an unformatted SATA drive. I bought the drive and a seperate enclosure to make my own external.
-The DVR will format the drive itself, in fact, it has to, and will reformat any previously PC NTFS formatted drive it sees. It is only suposed to format the drive for a few mins, just enough to recognize the drive. I believe after that it writes the drive raw, or formats its own style on the fly
-I was attempting to use my PC to format the drive as a check to see if the drive was bad, because it was not behaving as it should have with the DVR. The 12 hour 4% completion seems to confirm this for me.


I have XP with SP2. Didn't know there was a limit to partition size, or what it is. Windows Disk Management was letting me create a single parition in its setup for the full drive, I believe. I was selecting the value it provided me with anyways.

I've got some IT guys at work looking at it, hopefully they'll confirm its messed. I also noticed today when removing the drive from the enclose that it appears a little corner plastic foot on the drive has been broken off, so perhaps the drive was dropped sometime during it making, or their OEM quality control is lacking.

If your PC recognized all the HD space then the complications I mentioned are not an issue. For future reference, they can be caused by older versions of XP and/or not service pack 2, older bios versions, older driver versions, and incompatibility with some PCs that have special drive overlay software installed. Although I have never come across the latter.

You could try using a third party drive utility to confirm it's actual workability. You may also have a copy of the old FDisk DOS utility laying around. That would allow you to make a small 32GB partition and then format it in FAT32, just to see if the drive works at all.

If it were an older IDE drive I'd say check the pins to see if it is set for slave or master, etc. but that is not a concern for you.

Not much of that is useful but I did have this thought.
Is the USB port you plugged the drive into a fast USB port, USB ver 2.0 If it is 1.0, it will not only be painfully slower but I have found it to have similar speed issues beyond even what it should do when formatting a drive.

With SP2 installed, XP is normally compatible with USB 2.0 but some models, like an old Dell I had, required special USB port drivers installed after the SP2 install, otherwise they still acted like 1.0

I used to recommend DEll to my friends years ago but lately they are starting to build thier PCs way to proprietary. I'm very surprised. they should have learned a lesson from Compaq. They were the kings of business PCs for a long time until they started building way to proprietary and IT departments rebelled against them because of the difficulties keeping track of all the special drivers needed and the inability to swap in common parts.

I think Dell's current sufferings are due to this similar strategy. Off topic rant over....

I gave the drive to a friend of mine who hooked the drive up directly to his PC via SATA2. Drive is indeed DOA. Now at least I know the drive is just shot, though I now have to go through the hassle of returning it RMA to the online store where I bought it. Such is cost of avoiding brick and mortar mark up I guess.

Thanks for the help.