Hello,
I bought a second hand internal hard drive last week from Ebay. My current system has a 160GB sata2 hard drive installed (Samsung HD160JJ) and it is plugged into my motherboard (A8N-SLI). The existing hard drive was 98% full, so I bought a this new one (500GB). According to the motherboard instructions, all I needed to do was insert it, plug in the power cable, plug in the SATA cable (which connects to my mobo, next to the existing sata2 cable), and thats it. Apparently I can add up to 4 hard drives.

I have done all this and then gone into 'my computer' / 'manage' to make sure its there. I can see it and so I have attempted to format it in the same way as my other hard drive (NTFS). I didn't choose 'quick format'.

It begins to format but always stops at 30% and then I can hear the hard drive start to click every few seconds. Thats it, it never progresses past 30%.

If I perform a 'quick format', it seems OK, however If I attempt to copy a lot of data onto it (drive 'E'), after a while it just stops / freezes.

Any thoughts on this ?

Thanks

I would go to the manufacturers website and download their diagnostic tools. Do a long test, if it comes up good then try reformatting or otherwise try formatting it from recovery console (this is dependant on what version of windows you have, please let me know if you want info on this).

Here is the link for the samsung tools.

Download Center SAMSUNG

Unfortunately i don't have a lot of experience with samsung hard drives, so i have never used their diagnostic utility.

Please post back if the above doesn't help.

Hi,

When I logon, I get the option of choosing Windows XP or recovery console. I have never bother with the latter before. How do I reformat the disk using this ?

Boot into recovery console > select Windows Installation you want to log onto (usually 1) Press Enter > Type Administrator Password.
At the prompt type the following:
format d: /Q /fs:NTFS

Change the letter "d" in the above example to the drive letter of the hard drive you want to format.

Please post back if you have any problems.

Hello,

Typical how things get worse and worse. I have never gone into my BIOS before, or gone into the recovery setup. I have tried to do this now, but cannot get into either. It seems that when my PC boots up (at the point where it says press 'DEL' to enter BIOS, or at the point where I can select 'recovery Mode'), my CAPSLOCK, NUMLOCK and SCROLLOCK lights are all on. When I press DEL or try to use the up/down arrow to get into recovery, nothing happens. When my PC gets to the logon stage, the lights go out and I can type. Typical.

Therefore, I went to the SAMSUNG website that you mentioned above and downloaded the ESTOOL.EXE. I had to create a boot disk to boot into MS-DOS (this took me ages to figure out), then I copied the ESTOOL.EXE onto the same boot disk. Upon boot, I go into DOS mode. Hurrah. Alas, my keys are all locked again and I can't run ESTOOL.EXE.

Any ideas ?

Regards

This is common if you are using a wireless keyboard - but it could also be a problem with your keyboard if it's wired. Try using another keyboard (not wireless) if you don't have one see if you can borrow one from a friend.

Hello,
Managed to borrow another keyboard and I can get into DOS prompts (at boot time) to run Samsungs ESTOOL.EXE disk checking software.

It reports :-

ERROR: LBA 295677327
Service code AJ24 Bad sector
Error : ECC error

I then ran a full in depth scan and it was displaying lots of these LBA messages, so I stopped it.

Whats the best thing to do ?

Thanks