Formatting problem in Win XP

[R_Andersen]

I have a system set up with two drives. A 3.1GB and a 14.5GB, both western digitals. I had Win98 installed on the 14.5GB drive. I then formatted the 3.1GB in FAT32 and installed WinXP on it. When i tried to format it, it got to 100% and an error came up saying "Windows was unable to complete the format". I then had to install WinXP by converting from Fat32 to NTFS rather than a full format.

I now have WinXP runing properly and want to format the 14.5GB drive and copy the entire 3.1GB drive over to it and run from the larger drive. When I try to format the 14.5GB drive I get the exact same error message. I even converted the drive to NTFS which worked fine and tried a quick format, but I still got the same error message.

Any advice on what may be causing this problem would be appreciated. I need to get the 14.5GB formatted since I'm out of space on the other drive.

Thanks,
Rob A.

 

[AndyP]

Have you checked your disk for errors, using scandisk or even better Norton DiscDoctor?
You could also consider buying Partition Magic 7.0 which is an excellent disk-managment program, and makes it easy partitioning, formating and switch files between discs!

 

[PsychoSpongeBob]

Yep
use the 98 boot disk and run fdisk, delete and recreat partitions
reboot with disk again and run format c: /u

About just copying the 3.1 over to the larger one, more than likeley you will have to reinstall XP on the new partition on the big drive since most OS dont like or even wont let you just copy and paste its system files and settings especially when you installed XP on that small disk it was labeled as the D: drive

you can give it a whirl and see what happends but I would just recommend just reinstalling on the fresh partition on the big drive and use like a 300-800 mb partition on the small drive as the paging file (swap file) to increase performance

Dont worry about NTFS unless you need to restict access or encrypt your files