30 gig hard drive won't format

**jon112981** · November 7th, 2002, 11:14 AM

Anyone know what a "not ready format terminated" message means when I'm trying to format a hard drive. I'm forced to do it in dos because it just won't do anything when I tell windows to format it.

**Love2Learn** · November 7th, 2002, 11:17 AM

hmph that is weird fdisk the drive and set the partition active maybe? dunno im no xpert

-L2L

**Richard Cranium** · November 7th, 2002, 11:18 AM

What brand and size ?

What operating system.

**jon112981** · November 7th, 2002, 11:22 AM

It's a WD 30 gig drive. the OS on it is XP. I'm sticking it as a slave in an XP computer now. I just need to wipe the thing clean and restart from scratch with it.

**DPA** · November 7th, 2002, 11:32 AM

just blame it on XP... thats what the rest of us XP haters do

try getting partition magic 7.0

you have to be in the OS to use it tho.

**jon112981** · November 7th, 2002, 11:44 AM

The thing is though I'm running this through DOS. I'm not even in any OS just booted off a floppy and formating using that floppy. Oh well. If nothing else I can probably still send it back to WD and get a new one.

**Richard Cranium** · November 7th, 2002, 11:54 AM

You should be able to simply open my computer, then right click on the slave HD, choose format.

IF that don't work install it as the master, remove the other HD, get a W98 boot disc and do a format c:

**jon112981** · November 7th, 2002, 12:13 PM

Yep doc I tried that. Didn't work so hot and froze my computer totally. I'm trying to format it as the master drive off a 98 boot disk. It seems to spend a lot of time trying to recover allocation units....