Help!! Going crazy here trying to format this hard drive. I actually bought two and both are not working. It shows up in my computer with a drive letter, but when I go to format it, it says: "Windows NT Cannot complete the format" They are 80 gig seagate drives. I have already downloaded and ran the DiscWizard 2003 from Seagate. I have tried everything and I don't know what else to do.

It would be helpful if you told us what you had tried and how they are configured. Are they master/slave, two standalones on each ide channel... what? I take it that diskwizard saw everything OK. But are the disks partitioned, raw, formated? If so what sizes and formats. You say NT says it can't format. But how then is there a drive letter already? You didn't partition and format these drive yet have you? With what? Not that we need a novel or anything :-)

Is the drives recognised in BIOS? If not install drive overlay software which will format/partition drives! If your PC recognises the drive, install NT and a choice of where to install and the option to delete/create partitions is presented! Lastly NT4 does not support NTFS5 and FAT32

We had similar problems with our servers here at our company. If you were trying to install NT using the Full 80 GB it wont work. The reason we did this is because NT I believe only supports a partition of up to 4 GB. What we did to resolve this is we broke nt in two partitions first partition (c:) 250MB second partition a little less than 4 GB. Once we installed NT we used partion magic to resize the partition (D:) to our desired size. Hope this helps

Thanks everybody for your help so far!! Let's see here: I am using this disk for separate storage only. I have a 60 gig seagate that formatted fine. Diskwizard did see everything OK. >>>You say NT says it can't format. But how >>>then is there a drive letter already? That's the weird thing. A drive letter shows up but I cannot drag anything to the folder. I partitioned and formatted it with DiskWizard2003. The disk is recognized, it just won't let me use it. I click on the drive letter and it says: "The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that the required file system drivers are loaded. Know where to get the required file system drivers???

Manny shame you didn't read a posting I did at NTFAQ.com in 1999 concerning installing NT to large disks. http://www.windows2000faq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=13922 What you did works but you fragmented your master file table. This has a serious impact on performance. Boot time defrag by Diskeeper can repair this. Ryan if you have NT installed why are you using 3rd party apps to partition and format? It has a drive letter because there is a partition there! Wipe the drive. No partitions. Then use Disk Administrator [after you have service packed to 6a for NT] to partition and format. Your problems will be solved. From the error message it looks like DiskWizard made it a fat32 partition. NT does not work with fat32.

Thanks for the help, but I changed to hitachi 60 gigs and they formatted up just fine. That's a good way of dealing with a problem right? Dump the Hot difficult one and go for the nice easy one...hehe