7th drive format problem

[legendsinc]

A mate of mine has been gradually adding to his file server he has built and
has encountered a problem.

He presently has a 80 gig as his primary 'C' drive, then a cdrom drive and
then another 6 drives (one 200gig drive and 5 x 250gig drives.

It's a gigabyte raid board that has raid and all the bells and whistles on
it.

When he added the 7th drive (250gig) the other night, it got to 55% format
and then just hung, tried fdisking it, deleting partitions, etc., everytime
he tried to format it, it would hang at 55%.

He thought he had a bad drive and had it swapped over, the new one does the
same.

He's running XP pro, does it have limitations as to total hard drive space
or what???

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

[Sir]

hm...i'm not sure
i'll just bump it cuz i wanna find out

[Cricket]

What brand is the hard drive?

Has he tried the manufacturer's hard drive diagnostic utility on it yet? Could be the drive already has bad sectors on it.

Cricket

[Techno]

Your friend has got hard drives that have been formated and are working properly in xp.
The last drive was added and is hanging ? maybe take a few drives off line and try the hard drive again ?.
If the last hard drive formats ok ? then maybe the motherboard cannot handle the last drive ?
I think the motherboard might be stressed a little too much ?.
Also get partion magic and see if the partion is all the way to the right and not showing unused space ? if it is ? resize the partion to full and update settings in partion magic.

[glc]

With that many drives, he may be taxing the power supply too much - you need a top quality power supply to handle that big a load. Note - it's not the absolute power rating, it's CLEAN power - a quality 300 watt power supply will handle a higher actual load than a garbage 400+ watt, for example.