I am 12 hours into a reformat of my c drive. These are the commands that I have entered Format c:/q Invalid existing format This disk cannot be quick formatted Proceed with Unconditional format (y/n) Y Formatting Trying to recover allocation unit (it is up to 57,000 on a 2gb hard drive) Does anyone know how long this will take? I am afraid of stopping the reformat process as I don't know whether that will do more harm than good. Any advice?

Hi I'm about to head off. However if I read you correctly, 12hrs have passed and still it has not formated a 2G drive. Well it wont harm it to stop the format. First just check the ide cable and the connectors are seated properly. (not the problem - but it pays to check just to make sure) Then I think you realy need to download a diagnostic from the hard drive manufacturers website to create a bootable floppy. Generally there is a Setup utility as well. Anyhow run the diagnostic, You may be lucky and the diagnostic will include a zeroing (low level formating) utility. You can try killdisk which does about the same thing. Then either fdisk and format c: /u or try the bootable setup utility. (it will ask you for a boot disk)

your hard disk is most likely dead just stop the procedure, for the drive can no longer be used to install windows on use it as a second drive in a system, then run scandisk from windows if you like, or run a dianostic to see if it really is dead, but a 200mhz machine is old enough to be sure the hard disk is dead

The hard drive was working before I started this process. My goal was to install Windows ME. I only had a full version and it was calling for the upgrade, so I thought I would just start from scratch. I previously had installed the windows 98 upgrade over windows 95 and it would not accept a full windows me installation. This is a Sony VAIO, and I am trying to the install without using the Recovery Disk.

There is no way to know how long the format will take. It depends upon how many bad sectors (allocation units) are found on the harddrive. I agree with the suggestion to run a "write-zero's" utility on the harddrive. This will completely wipe the harddrive clean & may recover many of the bad sectors. You will then have to use fdisk to recreate a Primary DOS Partition and set it Active. Then format the HD again. Then run Scandisk from DOS. This will give you a good indication of just how badly damaged the HD is. Re-run Scandisk at least weekly for a few weeks. If it is continuing to find bad sectors, your HD is on it's way out & shouldn't be trusted with any important information. On the other hand, I've got a laptop HD that I received several years ago that had bad sectors on it. 3 years later, there are no additional bad sectors. It probably sustained some physical damage before I got it, but hasn't developed any additional problems since then. HTH Dave

"Trying to recover allocation unit (it is up to 57,000 on a 2gb hard drive)" This tells you that it has found 57,000 bad spots on the hard drive. Normally you will see zero, or at most a handful if the drive is useable. If the hard drive isn't defective, then you have a defective hard drive controller or a cable problem.

craig, the message indicats that it is up to allocation unit number 57,000...not that it has found 57,000 bad ones. HTH Dave