"Windoze cannot format hard drive"

[hedniskhjartad]

I bought a snazzy new 1TB external WD hard drive yesterday. It came with FAT32, and I tried to do a slow format, to convert it to NTFS, but it stopped mid-format and said "windows cannot format hard drive". I tried again, to no avail, and this time, in properties, the file system said "RAW" :|

Then I did a fast NTFS format, and it was successful. Anyway, I tried doing it through Disk Management, but the same thing happened. Then I finally tried a slow format through "rightclick-format" one more time, and it was successful.

Why did this happen? And more importantly, can this pose a problem in the future? I'd rather not copy tons of stuff on there only for the file system to become corrupt or the hard drive to fail. Any suggestions??

[kevdriver]

Have you tried scaning the disk for errors using chkdsk. Then try reformating again. Also you could try making a partition of 500 gigs and formatting itm then formatting the other 500 gig partition........

[NightbladeXX]

try this Acronis Disk Director 10 it has a free trial

[hedniskhjartad]

I'll try using Acronis now, thanks for the advice.

Lots of people have told me to have 2 500 gig partitions :|

Is it really that unwieldy to have a 1tb drive? There's a certain huge amount of data that I'd rather like to keep categorized in one place, and i've been dying for a 1tb for that specific purpose. If it's really unwise to have a 1tb, i'll trim it down to half and half, but how necessary is it?

[Chewy]

having a single 1 TB partition shouldn't be an issue, the issues would be having too many files in any one directory

sounds like you are having issues with usb2, it's so slow and system intensive, I would forsee problems with an unstable computer and OS installation

slow format is the way to go tho, making doubly sure any bad sectors get marked

[hedniskhjartad]

500/500 it is then... and a slow format too.
Thank you all very much.