Reformat Main Hard Drive Without Windows CD?

furnace

furnace

furnace

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Worthing, West Sussex
I'm having trouble running a couple games, and I decided that I'm going to reformat to see if it fixes anything.

But the problem is, when I installed windows after getting this rig running, I had to put the hard drive in my brothers computer to format it - for some reason this windows CD just kept telling me that my hard drive was damaged after spending about half a second trying to format it, which it obviously isn't, as it's working right now and formatted fine from windows in the other PC. Windows must use different code to format it than the windows install CD does :rolleyes:

So yeah, now I need to reformat, but my brother's gone off to uni with his computer. What can I use to reformat that isn't the windows CD? It's my primary (and only) hard drive so it's gonna have to be something bootable :confused:

Also probably worth noting that it's a Sata 2 hard drive, and I'm on a Gigabyte DS4 mobo.
 
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I'd get the latest BIOS update and then run a disk check.

I'm sure the Windows CD wouldn't say the disk is bad for no reason.

What hard drive is it? How old is it?
 
Brand spanking new Western Digital 160GB Sata2 HDD...

At the time I had F5 bios, now I have F8.

Formatting the disk in windows on another computer worked, didn't come up with any errors :confused: So surely the hard drive is ok if it works within windows, and just messes up when installing/formatting from the disk? I was thinking that the software on the disk just didn't support my hard drive or something...

I need to format but I'm scared I'm gonna delete the partition then end up with no way to format the hard drive! :(
 
Worsed come to worse... if you have a floppy disc drive you could make an old windows 98 boot CD and see if that will format the disc to FAT32 (then convert the disc to NTFS once back into windows) but sounds like a problematic and painful way to do it...
 
Rroff said:
Worsed come to worse... if you have a floppy disc drive you could make an old windows 98 boot CD and see if that will format the disc to FAT32 (then convert the disc to NTFS once back into windows) but sounds like a problematic and painful way to do it...
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Hrm yeah, and I doubt win98 would support Sata..?

I think even the original XP installation disks didn't support Sata?

It's starting to look like I'm gonna have to risk it... What would you do? :confused:

Oh actually, how about this:

Reformat, if doesn't work, put an IDE hard drive in this computer on the same ribbon as the CD drive, and format the IDE drive. If that works, install windows on there. Once inside windows, format the Sata2 hard disk. Once that's done (sigh) take out the IDE hard disk, then install windows XP on the Sata2 hard disk. Once that marathon is done, stick the IDE hard drive back in, and reformat it to get windows off it.

Guess I gotta prepare to move some data off one of my old hard drives :rolleyes:

That should work though, right?
 
furnace said:
Hrm yeah, and I doubt win98 would support Sata..?
Click to expand...

not sure here but I think it depends more on how your BIOS presents SATA drives to the OS... not something I've played with in awhile tho.

Personally if I was in your position I'd buy a cheap seagate 80gig sata 2 drive for ~£30 and install the OS on there and use the other drive for games/storage.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-051-SE
 
Nope :(

I have a CD, but when I first set up this PC it didn't wanna format my hard drive, so it feels like a bit of a risk deleting this partition when I might not be able to reformat..!
 
Ok is this right.

You try and format your Hard Drive in your PC and it wont format right?

Then you try it in your brothers PC and it works right?

So if it wont let you format it on your pc but it will on your brothers this means it isnt the Hard drive.

If your CD is mucked up or something it wont prevent you from not formating your Hard Disk becuase its not the Disc that formats your Hard Drive.

All the disk does is enable you to get into the partition screen.
 
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My brother already had windows installed - this thread's getting confusing now eh! I'll try and clear it up a bit, sorry if I make a nonce of myself :p

My new PC posts
Insert'd windows CD
Boots up from CD
Create partition
Format
*hard drive couldn't be formatted, could be damaged*

Off to brothers PC which already has windows installed
Stick hard drive in there
boot up into windows, which is alrady installed
right click my computer -> manage -> disk management -> right click unformatted partition -> quick format
Turn off PC

Take hard drive out of PC, put it into my new one
Boot off windows CD
This time it doesnt ask to format or creat partition, it's already there (created it just then on brothers PC)
Choose install windows on selected partition
Etc, windows installs.



BUT the problem now, is that I don't have my brothers PC, and I'm about to delete my partition due to games not working properly and I wanna start again ... so I was thinking that if the formatting software on the Windows CD still doesn't wanna format my hard drive, how am I gonna get it formatted without a second PC!

But yeah, my best solution so far is to use an IDE hard drive from another computer if I can't get it to format my Sata hard drive. Then boot into windows on the IDE hard drive, and format the Sata hard drive. Then take that hard drive out, and start again with my (reformatted) sata drive!

BUT it would make things a lot easier if there was a bootable CD that formatted hard drives that wasn't the WinXP CD. Then if the XP CD still refuses to format my hard drive, I'd have a backup CD that I could try :D
 
furnace said:
right click my computer -> manage -> disk management -> right click unformatted partition -> quick format
Click to expand...

wonder if you had tried a proper format (which I assume the Windows XP CD setup does) it would have worked or not...
 
Rroff said:
wonder if you had tried a proper format (which I assume the Windows XP CD setup does) it would have worked or not...
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Yeah I was wondering the same thing.

I always go for the quick format option though, I know it's bad, but a full format takes hours :confused: I've never had a full format take a "reasonable" amount of time, they always take ages...

Even on windows install I use quick format.

Has anyone really had any bad experiences using quick format rather than full format? Or is it just one of those things where "technically" you're gonna have problems, but in reality nobody does..?

@t31os I'll try out partition magic then :D
 
I would run the XP setup again, and do a FULL NTFS format - not a quick one!

If the drive fails that, then run Western Digital's diagnostic softare, to make sure you don't have a dodgy drive.
 
basmic said:
I would run the XP setup again, and do a FULL NTFS format - not a quick one!

If the drive fails that, then run Western Digital's diagnostic softare, to make sure you don't have a dodgy drive.
Click to expand...
I did try both quick and full at the time... Just when I put it in my bros PC I just did quick. I didn't realise WD had software though, I got the drive OEM so I'll have a look on their site!
 
If the drive formats without error on a friends PC but not yours (and is continuing to exhibit problems in games) then another possibility is a faulty drive controller on the motherboard.

As for formatting a SATA drive without using Windows, I'd suggest downloading Ubuntu or Knoppix, burn to a CD. Then boot off that and there is a partition manager in there. They are both "live" Linux CD's but you don't need any Linux knowledge as they run from CD.

The Ubuntu partition manager is called GPart (just look for it in one of the menus) and the Knoppix one will be similar.
 
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