I hooked a 3rd drive up to the pc to format it like i have done so many other times lol
but when i try to format i get this error msg "WINDOWS CAN NOT FORMAT THIS DRIVE.Quit any disk utilities or other programs that might be useing the drive.And that windows is not desplaying the contents of this drive and try again"

Well nothing is useing the drive(nothing open) and its should be working like it allways has.Any idea what it might be??
thanks.......whome

What sort of drive, operating system, have you checked the jumper settings, and is it displayed and set up in the bios?

This could be a corrupt partition table. You may want to just blow the partition away in DOS with FDISK and start from scratch.

Let me guess, your using windows xp right? It does that to me every time as well.

Originally posted by Stryker_PornStar
Let me guess, your using windows xp right? It does that to me every time as well.

Really when i have 1 drive it formats the 2nd just fine assumed it would do the 3rd the same way.
So fdisk then??

drive is 160 gig WD drive
OS is win XP pro
yes checked jumper settings and everything its working fine hooked up as slave just wanted to format before transfering files to it

Ya it looks like FDISK time lol
thanks guys

Originally posted by whome
Really when i have 1 drive it formats the 2nd just fine assumed it would do the 3rd the same way.
So fdisk then??

drive is 160 gig WD drive
OS is win XP pro
yes checked jumper settings and everything its working fine hooked up as slave just wanted to format before transfering files to it

Ya it looks like FDISK time lol
thanks guys

The problem is with the size of the drive. Windows XP does not support a drive that size without SP1. It will only recognize 137GB as it does not support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing. So it's either the SP1 Service Pack of FDISK. Even if you FDISK you will still have the same problem in Windows without SP1.........................

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013&Product=winxp

Whome, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you have a similar problem a few months ago and we sorted it out?

Originally posted by Insomniac
Whome, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you have a similar problem a few months ago and we sorted it out?

that prob was from virus on company pc.And yes that was fixed
I learned my leason on that one and a few new things

I just assumed i could format a 3rd HD just like the others i did this way but it didnt work.So i just fdisked it And yes i have the SP1 for xp and its installed.I allready have 2 hd's(200gig & 100gig) in the pc was just trying to format the 3rd hd and got that error