HD partition problem
 

I am trying to re-partition an 80gb maxtor drive to prepare it for a reinstall of debian.

I am using windows XP to do this in disk manager, now I can partition the drive ok but when I try to format it, it gets to about 50-60% then just hangs and I have tried both NTFS and FAT 32...

I was using the drive before in windows and I sometimes got cyclic redundency errors ??? whatever that means??? and when I tried before to install linux on the first partition of the drive, there were some kind of problem with the clusters,,, how can I resolve this problem ??

get a tool (always free) from the hdd vendor.
Or use Ultimate boot CD, erase the whole disk with killdisk or such a tool.
Then have a install win in for example 20 GB space. leave the rest unpartitioned.
Install Debain using the rest of the HDD, let grub install into the MBR.

Thats it.

Probably the hard drive has some bad sectors. You have to check it to find where these bad sectors are. Then, you could make your partitions leaving out the bad regions.

But, a disk with bad sectors isn't very trustful, so keep in mind to backup often important data.

Thanks odcheck,

I am using killdisk now and hopefully it will work :)

Masterclassic, yea I think you could be right, I will check for them too

It is highly unlikely an 80GB drive has bad sectors. All drives will develope bad sectors, and all drives have spare sectors, and when a modern drive has to make too many passes to read a bad sector, it will automatically re-map the data in the sector to a spare without the user ever knowing before it is un-readable.
If you copy and paste "cyclic redundancy errors" in a google search field, you'll know what it is.
One cause could be that it is a PATA drive on a 40 wire ATA cable instead of an 80 wire cable and there is some crosstalk happening.
And you will only see Linux complain about clusters when installing Linux to a Windows file system, you should let the Linux installer format the partition in a native Linux file system like ext3. Windows file systems have clusters, Linux file systems have blocks.

Thanks for the info and thats what I am doing now, letting linux do it

looks like my drive has some problems, I just reinstalled debian linux AGAIN and this time I let the installer set up the partitions, so far so good, but when the system finished and rebooted there were many read errors from one of the partitions,,,,the drive is a few years old so maybe it is time to buy a new one :(

Can you locate if these problems occur in a specific part of the disk?
Sure, it's better to buy a new disk if this one has this kind of problems, but the old could be used somehow, even not at full capacity.
You could partition it outside the "bad region".
(I don't like to put old hardware to trash :) )

I disagree. something like a hard drive--with a variety of known failure mechanisms--is going to keep dying once it starts. Any significant issues and it is OUT.

Similar principle with car batteries: The first time it goes flat without a good reason, maybe re-charge and get it tested. The second time, it's gone.

I would put that drive in the another computer, partition and format it and use it to see if you have similar issues with a different computer before jumping to conclusions.
A good utility for checking/repairing hard drives is SpinRite, in it's day before drives automatically re-mapped bad sectors it was dubbed a hard drive saver because it will check every sector and re-map bad sectors if there are any without destroying the data, and isolate the bad sectors so they will not be used again. SpinRite has quite a history of rejuvenating seemingly dead hard drives.
As mentioned before, modern hard drives re-map bad sectors transparently if there is no issues with the firmware. Maybe flashing the HDD firmware might do some wonders.
When older hard drives developed bad sectors and did not automatically re-map them, the operating system would tell you there are bad sectors. Nowadays it is un-heard of for an operating system to report bad sectors because of the obvious.
[mod_edit]content of dubious legality removed[/mod_edit]

Oh gosh,

did you do the hdd wipe thing?
Forget all the horror. Wipe it, part it and format it.
If it doesn't work throw it in the trashcan and buy for 99$ a 500GB HDD IDE.

And while no direct links to pirated software were posted
the mod-team would really appreciate if people refrained
themselves from hinting at criminal options, Mr Junior Hacker...


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for all the info guys but it does look as though the HD is on a one way trip to the trash can,,, I can partition and format into 3 partitions using the first one at 15gb and the third one at 33gb but the 2nd partition will not even format,,,,
Oh well another 80gb bites the dust,,,