I'm having problems formatting my hard drive after I do fdisk. It terminates at about 30% of completion with a message "Not ready Format terminated".The hard drive is one year old and has no erors at diskscan. Does anybody know what's happening?

My suggestion would be to do a Low Level format on the HDD. I also would suggest that you find a LLF utility that was specifically for your HDD. There are generic LLF utilities out there, but I would use them only as a last resort. V-Peace-V

Liliya, did you remove all your extended partitions and logical drives before you partitioned your disk? 99% of the time that is why formatting stops part way through-the program runs into old partitions and garbage left over from previous setups and can't go any further. There is really nothing to conflict or prevent format from completing other than that. This complaint is especially more common now that people are converting form FAT32 to NTFS.

From Liliya I did delete the original partitions. I managed to format the drive using XP CD, but now I'm getting a different error that terminates OS installation "Kernel Data Inpage error" What is it?

Hi Liliya, Following is the explanation for that particular error message you are getting from the Microsoft Tech Website: "This error indicates that Windows NT wasn't able to read a page of kernel data from the page file. Bad memory, a bad processor, incorrectly terminated SCSI devices, or a corrupt PAGEFILE.SYS file may cause this situation. The first step in correcting such an error is to recreate the PAGEFILE.SYS file and see if you can bring your system back online." I have had no experience with this particular message, but what it seems to me that you don't have any SCSI devices connected (do you?) and your Pagefile.sys hasen't been installed yet, that leaves your SIMM chips and Harddrive. I assume that you have had no problems with either of those before formatting, and that brings me back to my original suggestion. Are you sure that you First deleted Logical Drives, then Extended Partitions, and then your Primary Partition, In That Order? Old, leftover partitions can cause wierd problems and messages, I know that for a fact. Try this: Download clearhdd.exe here: http://www.samsungelectronics.com/hdd/support/faqs/faq_1320.html Drag and drop this onto your boot floppy, it's only 11k. Reboot. At the A: prompt, type: clearhdd.exe 0 It will ask you twice if you really want to do this, hit Y two times. Then type: clearhdd.exe 1 same thing. Now for sure your disk is wiped. Now try to reformat and see what happens. If the same problems appear, either one of your SIMM chips is going bad, or there is a problem with the drive itself and you might want to return it.

Hi Ranchhand, I’m not sure about the order I took off the partitions, but I didn’t follow any particular order, so I’ll do that. I don’t have any SCSI devices connected, but I did have formatting errors before, and I’m considering getting a new harddrive. I did download the exe and will run it. Is there a way to check the SIMM chips? Thank you for your help, I wouldn't be able to get throught this by myself.

Hi Lil... Yes, it is necessary to delete logical drives first, then extended partitions, then your Primary partition last. Otherwise a bunch of garbage will be left on the disk. In the fdisk screen there are ordinarily 4 options; if you see 5 (five) options in your screen, it means that you have additional partitions/logical drives remaining on the disk. The 5th option allows you to choose which partition to deal with. If you use the little utility I referred you to, it is great and will save you a lot of time and aggravation, especially in this circumstance. I use it every week, and it nukes everything clean by going low-level and erasing the actual cylinder-data itself. BTW - there is a space between the ".exe" and "0" in the command-it's easy to miss. Post back and let us know how it went.