Hard Drive Reformatting Problem

[jra64]

Having a problem with my hard drive. It was working fine but a few days ago i installed a radeon 9600 se video card and a usb controller in order to play pc games. I tried to restart my computer afterwards but it wouldn't actually restart so I had to turn it off manually. I turn the computer back on and while its booting up I get a message saying that windows can't find the file /system32.hal.dll. That I should reinstall the file. I couldn't get that to work so I attached my hard drive to a friend's CPU and it says that I need to reformat the drive. So we try and right when the status bar reaches full it says that it's unable to complete the formatting of the drive. Any ideas why the formatting can't complete? Will I need to buy a new hard drive?

[rjfvillarosa]

What make of hard drive is it?

[Markoman01027]

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000490.htm

[HyperTF]

Out of curiosity, how are you reformatting it? what method?

[rcvalencia9]

Its better to format hard drives in DOS not in Windows. Its faster and better. Create a boot disk and insert the floppy in your floppy drive then type format cif its your drive letter). that is full format and will check for bad sectors.

[Markoman01027]

We need complete System Specs first.

[glc]

If it's the 200gb drive, your friend's computer may not support drives that large.

[jra64]

its a 40GB samsung.

my sys specs are:

p4 2.4 gig
abit ic7g
kingston 3200 512 ddr

i have been formatting from windows but we are trying to format it in dos as im typing this.

my friend has 2 200 gig hds so im sure his can read my 40

[rjfvillarosa]

If you go to the Samsung site you should be able to dowmload a diagnostic utility that can be run in DOS and will diagnose your hard drive for faults and also allow you to do a zero fill (low level format).
I don't know the Samsung tool as I have never used it, but the Seagate and Maxtor versions are excellent.