Hi, My Maxtor 500GB hard drive recenty died on me after less than a year's useage, so we decided to buy a new hard drive. I purchased a 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black and plugged it into the computer. Please bare in mind, I currently have no OS installed on this hard drive. So I started formatting the new drive with the Windows XP CD, I left it running and returned to it later, only to find a message saying the hard drive could not be formatted (explaining to check connections/power etc. and that it might be damaged). I have checked all the connections and tried again, but I'm still getting the same error message. Surely my brand new hard drive isn't already damaged? It arrived very well packaged. Is there anything I should try? Other forum posts have been useless, as people advise downloading programs to check the hard drive, which isn't possible unless I had an OS installed on the computer. Ryan
Hi and welcome to the forums... So many things can go wrong under the hood... if the HD is brand new, at least you covered there... Please check that your drive's jumpers are set-correctly. Is this a PATA drive or a SATA drive? in any case you will need to try alternative cables just to cover that angle and of course try to use different sockets on the motherboard. I had an illusive SATA controler which went bad on the motherboard. It drove me nuts and only a carfull test of all this little things found the fault eventually.... Good luck....
