I Need a Little help with a format problem

[Modex]

Hi All,

I wonder if someone could help me please.
Hardware Athlon 2000XP 256M DDr ram
I have Windows 2000 professional, service Pack 2 and have just purchased an 80 gig Seagate barracuda IDE hard drive and went to format it with disk administrator and after waiting what seemed eternity to format it can up with a message unable to format correctly and showed up in the drive window as "at risk".

I then split the drive into 2 partitions of 40 meg and tried again thinking it was the size of the drive that was causing problems, but I have just finished the first partition format and its formatted, but again, by the side of the disk letter it says "at Risk".

Could someone please help me on this, am I doing something wrong. I have never seen this before.

PS Even though it says at risk I can create directories, files and delete with no problems.

many thanks

modeX

 

[butchrecon]

I am unsure what the "At Risk" is. However one thing I suggest since it is a new drive is take it back where you purchased it from and get another drive. This way you eliminate the faulty drive syndrom. James Collins
Field Service Engineer
A+, MCP

email: butchrecon@skyenet.net

Please let us (Tek-tips members) know if the solutions we provide are helpful to you. Not only do they help you but they may help others.

 

[Eagle8648]

With Windows 2000 you cannot format a drive partition larger that 32G if you are using FAT32. If you convert the drives to NTFS then you can do 2 40G partitions or 1 80G partition. Keep in mind, if you convert to NTFS the you will not be able to read the drive with Windows 95/98 operating systems installed on those drives (you can if you are networked to 95/98 machines and they are granted permissions to see the drives). For more information on FAT32 partitions you can visit this website:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/en/ProRK/prdf_fls_dxob.htm

If you do not wish to convert to NTFS then I suggestion splitting the drive to three partitions with none of them being any larger that 32G.

 

[Modex]

Thanks for the help Guys

Also thanks Eagle8648 for the additional advice re FAT32 and NTFS and for the link

cheers

ModeX