Hard drive allocation units

[blockers]

Hi.
I have recently got hold of a 60gb maxtor hard drive, and fdisked it. I am now formatting it, but it seems to be "Trying to recover allocation unit" it has been going for about 14hours - but the allocation unit has changed, it is now on 1,000,000ish

Anyone know how many allocation unit's there are?

Will

[da_ging]

its got bad sectors m8 it will stop recovering when its stopped finding bad sectors , if its taken 14 hours already then its rma time

[blockers]

arrgg...i was suspected something dodgy was going on....

[marc_ellis]

Try a low leval format, should get rid of the bad clusters

[eldren]

Bad sectors, yes. Low level format to "get rid" of them? No. As the format proggie goes along, any sectors it finds get marked as bad, so that you don't inadvertently store precious data on it. Low level formatting removes this "black list", which is maintained at filesystem level (As far as I know, this excluding the internal blacklist, but most people don't even know of that. :> ). Thus, it may be possible for you to wind up with fewer bad sectors, but this would only mean that you increase your changes of data loss, because sectors previous found to be bad and now not marked as such may wind up storing that invaluable piece of data of yours. RMA it, if possible.

Note, however, that you may want to try it on a different machine first - if that too fails, you know it's broken. If it doesn't, then you may want to look at the first machine's RAM or IDE channels.

[blockers]

Im doing a low level format now. i tried installing windows on it, but it kept having problems finding files, when it never had before (off the CD.)

Hopefully a low level will get it sorted