formatting tools

[ti479]

hello,

i am new to this forum- so hello to all. i am trying to find a formatting tool that i can boot to from the bios and run outside of an O.S.. I have a hitchi drive in my dell 1505, and i installed Dream linux on it

Now this is where in gets strange-- for whatever reason the installation didnt go smoothly, taking a very long time to copy to my HDD. i need to know if there is a formatting tool that i can use to reformat my drive and do a reinstall. i have heard about partion magic and acronis disk director but these only work in windows and they arent a bootable image.

any help would be appreciated.

scott

ti479@yahoo.com

[mikeL]

ti479, welcome to PC Mechanic. Your hard drive Mfg will have a diagnostic disk you can down load and run, also Ultimate Boot CD has a lot of useful tools, including numerous formatting programs, www.ultimatebootcd.com

[ti479]

thanks mike, i have tried to use ultimate boot and it will work .......but it would take 65hrs to complete the process.

is that normal? also tried finding hitachi hdd tools with no luck so if anyone knows to find them plz tell me.

thanks

scott

[TwoRails]

I use Gdisk (part of Ghost) to format / partition from a floppy as needed. There are other ways, though, like installing the drive in a working system to format it, then put it back in your box. I've never messed with the ultimate boot disk, but it sounds like your trying to do a format and wipe. Does it have a quick format option? Also, you may have to do a MBR repair.

[LeftyAce]

Shouldn't take 65 hours....
Hitachi diagnostics are on the Ultimate Boot Cd (They may be under IBM/Hitachi). I'd run them to make sure the drive's not having physical problems.

[Cricket]

Sounds like the Hitachi has developed bad clusters and will need to be replaced. If the drive is new contact the vendor or Hitachi for an RMA.

:) Cricket

[kilgoretrout]

Try the gparted livecd:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

It's a bootable cd that runs a free partitioning tool, gparted, which is a visual clone of PM with full support for linux filesystems. You should be able to reformat that Dreamlinux partition easily.

[glc]

Why not do a simple one pass zero fill with the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test? This will leave you with a totally blank unpartitioned drive. You should also run the diagnostics.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm?linkto=QL#DFT