new 1.5tb seagate won't format

J

JonnyK

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Jul 3, 2004
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I just ordered a new 1.5 TB drive from seagate and it won't format. I put it in the computer, replacing a 320 i was using before so i know the cables and stuff were working. The bios / windows can detect the drive, model number and all that. But when i go to windows disk management utility in computer management window and try to format the disk it won't do anything for a while, then it just says "windows was unable to complete the format" I tried putting my vista disk in and using the format utility that's in there and it also didn't work. And i tried seagate's seatools but nothing works.

I haven't had any experience with a drive this large, is there anything special you need to do to format it? or is the drive just DOA
 
I didnt read that you made a partition on the drive in disk management before trying to format it.....
 
Try creating a smaller partition (ie 1000gb) and then try and format that
 
I did that, if i remember correctly, when i first put the disk in i had to initialize it, then it was unallocated space. So i created a partition and formatted it, and it would just hang / fail.
 
I ran the quick test with seatools dos version and it found no problems. Then i went back into windows to try again and it's working now. the magic of computers!
 
might want to check your connection or get a new cable...that seems a little weird.
 
OK turns out it wasn't working after my last post. I was able to format a 1 TB partition but when i tried to format the last third of the drive it would still fail. Turns out it's an issue with nvidia forceware drivers. I found this link at the bottom of my seagate customer help email, with some common issues they had linked up.

http://seagate.custhelp.com/cgi-bin...pup_adp.php?p_faqid=5344&p_created=1219870913

So the nvidia forceware could only recognize 1.1TB on any hard drive before this update. Works perfect now.
 
THank you so much for this post!! And thank you google! When I did a full format, I'd get stuck at 74% each time. Quick format got the error message...

Same exact issue, going to try it out now...
 
Just downloaded, installed, and tried to format.... annnnddd... SUCCESS!!!

Thank you so much for posting back your findings, I spent the whole day bashing my head in because of this drive, and was ready to send it back... the one result out of only a handful of results that proved to be the solution. Usually the motherboard site has pretty up-to-date drivers, but apparently not. And windows update doesn't help w/ all of the forceware stuff apparently.
 
Awesome! I too would like to thank you guys for this find. I bet we are all just getting our new 1.5TB drives from Newegg's black friday deal, so I bet this will get a good number of hits.

To make it even easier, hit this link for the download of the drivers you need:

XP32
XP64
Vista32
Vista64
 
Good to see that you got this resolved. I had a similar issue where a format would fail at about 74% even though I didn't have an NVidia chipset. That was probably due to a bad drive since I RMAed it and got one that works fine.
 
I've got this problem now on my 1.5 tb drive. Problem is that I cannot get it to format the last third of the drive as well.

I use nforce drivers but rebranded through HP since this particular drive is in an HP slimline. I guess I'll try to format it on another machine after reading this post.
 
installing the newest nvidia forceware drivers fixed the issue thankfully. My problem was on a Nforce 430 6150se chipset.
 
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