Format second hard drive?

[aww999]

Had some problems with my PC lately which was tracked down to a motherboard issue, got it back now with new motherboard and new "master" hdd fitted. Now behaving very well apart from a few issues with the "slave" drive - I have tried to uninstall a few things from the slave and got "file corrupt" type messages, also trying to delete folders, files etc it will say "this file is corrupt and unreadable" and not let me do it.

I have copied all the files I need from the slave onto the master, should I format the slave drive to take me back to square one and give me a nice clean slate with no problems? The slave used to be the master in my old machine and has a load of windows 98 stuff on it, now running windows XP off the new master drive.

If so, what is the best way of formatting it? Right click on the drive in explorer, then go to tools and format?

If not, how should I fix the problem and sort the drive out so I can use it properly?

[__LEE__]

You could try and do all of the normal things first like running scandisk and defrag on the bugger although dependent on the level of corruption you may be better just formating it especially if it isn't using NTFS.

There is also the possibility there is a hardware problem with the drive as it sounds fairly old, it may be worthwhile formating the drive using NTFS and then running a hd monitoring app like the one below to see how it behaves.

www.download.com/Active-SMART/3000-2248_4-10330117.html?tag=lst-4-8

[aww999]

Scandisk runs everytime I start the pc up, it runs through the same list of about 10 problems every time, hangs for a moment, then says @unspecified error@ or something equally illuminating.


Tried to select "format drive" from within windows but it keeps saying that something else is using the slave drive (no programs running), and won't let me format it. How do I get round this? Can someone point me to an idiot-proof run through on the web somewhere?

[__LEE__]

Have you tried running XP in safe mode and then attempting the format in the event XP is doing something strange with the drive? (press F8 when the PC initially boots and choose safe mode)

I had a very similar problem with a clients home PC (XP SP2) once and got round it using safe mode, I never did locate the problem.


Alternatively use drivescrubber: www.iolo.com/ds/index.cfm

[thepassenger]

aww999 said:

Scandisk runs everytime I start the pc up, it runs through the same list of about 10 problems every time, hangs for a moment, then says @unspecified error@ or something equally illuminating.


Tried to select "format drive" from within windows but it keeps saying that something else is using the slave drive (no programs running), and won't let me format it. How do I get round this? Can someone point me to an idiot-proof run through on the web somewhere?

Often having Windows Explorer open will lock the drive so it can't format.
Best bet on an 2k/XP system is to dive in to the Administrative Tools, Manage Computer, Select the Storeage manager bit and then select the drive and just tell the system to vaporise it.

Alternativly your XP install is v. weird and Safe Mode is the way forward