Have tried to format my hard drive as my whole system crashed for no reason and i wasnt able to boot up xp.

I'm able to do a quick format, but when xp tries to install it says that it wasnt able to create the file /windows on the drive.

So i tried to do a standard format, but that just hangs when it reaches about 63%.

Is my hard drive dead? Or is there some way i can sort out the hard drive?

I've tried to format it about a dozen times but still i'm unable to install xp and do a standard format.

Any help would be appreciated

have you tried running fdisk and creating a new partition and formatting in that way?

what file system is the drive formatted as?

How long have you left it to format?

i tried to do it both with win98 and xp

I was able to do the partition in both xp and win98 but after when trying to format it just hangs at about 63%

The amount of time i left it to format (the longest time) was approx 4 hours.
During that time it was stuckm on 63% for over an hour.

Its a 40gb drive. file system tried both fat32 and ntfs.

Any suggestions?
Thanks

Yes, download a disk checking utility from the hard drive manufactures website and do a full test on the drive first, at least this will eliminate a hardware problem before we take this any further.

HTH

looks like some badsector on the hardrive, i had that before, took me 2 night to format a 30GB hardrive haha, i couldn't sleep cause it was making way too much noice. an hour ain't nothing man, does it makes weirdsounds when it get stuck? if yes then it's probably badsectors.