Samsung 1.5TB formatting issues?

Mr_Sukebe

Mr_Sukebe

Mr_Sukebe

Man of Honour
Man of Honour
Joined
23 Dec 2002
Posts
10,411
Location
London
Anyone know anything new about difficulties in formatting one of the new 1.5TB Samsung 5400rpm drives?
I installed one a couple of days ago that I bought from OCUK.
Can't seem to manage either a standard or quick format in XP using NTFS.

Any good suggestions?
My motherboard is a very recent Foxcon 61MPV.

Last time I ran a full format, ran for approx 3 hours, then failed right at the end.
 
I have not got a 1.5TB but i have a few 1TB samsung drives and i have had a DOA. I would start with trying there diags program the Hutil and let that check the drive is ok .

A full test was about 3 hours but worth it to make sure its ok

Rich
 
From reading around, looks like it could be compatibility issues with my motherboard, despite my motherboard being very new.
Samsung have a couple of utils here:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/Support_DiskManager.html

They might solve the problem, but need the creation of a bootable floppy. Fine it you still have a floppy drive, but I've not had one in the house in probably 4 years, done all my booting via CD for ages.

I know these guys are Korean, and sometimes like making things a challenge, but surely they can't think that consumers like to bugger about dish DOS screens nowadays?
 
Mr_Sukebe said:
Cool, HUTIL doesn't support my drive, too new...
Gotta love it.
Click to expand...
HUTIL is outdated and has been known to give false readings with the F1, let alone the F2. Use ES-Tool instead.

If you have a SATA optical drive and you have problems running ES-Tool from the bootable CD ISO, make sure your disk controller is set to legacy IDE/compatability mode, and if this still doesn't work you'll need to create a bootable flash drive and run the program from that.
 
Thanks again for the suggestions chaps.
I did try updating my Nforce drivers to the latest set, just incase it was a driver compatibility issue. Still couldn't run a quick format.

Finally got ES-Tools up and running last night from CD and kicked off a low level format.
Have to say that I was a little surprised that I couldn't see any format options, e.g. whether I wanted FAT32 or NTFS, so for all I know it's created a low level format in some obscure Chinese file format that windows can't read. Would have been nice to have more info on that.
If you're confused as to why I say "it's created", it's because it had only finished testing 66% of the disk after running for approximately 8 hours, so I left it running whilst I was at work.
 
Well it finished it's low level format and found no errors, but windows is still seeing it as unformatted and quick format failed again.

Any ideas on what I'm missing on this? Are there any jumpers that I should be playing with? I got the impression that as it's a SATA drive, that I just plug it in and it would work, as per the drive that used to be connected up.
 
Mine was fine, am using it in an external enclosure. :) I think some motherboards have issues with this drive however, does it use a VIA chipset?
 
My motherboard is a Foxcon M61PMV which uses an Nforce430 6100 chipset.
Does appear to be a compatibility issue as the drive has formatted fine, and the motherboard worked flawlessly with an older SATA drive on the same cable/connection.

Any good ideas?
 
BIOS update maybe? I think the issue with the VIA boards was this particular drive, maybe other 1.5TB models also, as the VIA board would work fine with other drives eg 500Gb drives. :)
 
Talked to Samsung themselves today and their comment was "the drive is faulty". Guess it wasn't me then. Time for an RMA....
 
Mr_Sukebe said:
My motherboard is a Foxcon M61PMV which uses an Nforce430 6100 chipset.
Does appear to be a compatibility issue as the drive has formatted fine, and the motherboard worked flawlessly with an older SATA drive on the same cable/connection.

Any good ideas?
Click to expand...

I was unable to format my 1.5tb drive on my P5N (nforce chipset) mobo, but once i updated the mobo/chipset drivers within windows it worked perfectly.
 
Well I went back again, checked the mobo firmware, updated the drivers (again) and lo and behold we're in business.
Phew, thanks for the suggestions chaps, would have been in a box for RMA otherwise.
 
Glad you got it going, I was going to suggest trying the drive on another (intel chipset based) PC if you have access to one, but you've got it all working now so it's all good. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom