Damaged drive?

[khan]

I'm working on a friends machine, just received new from IBuyPower.com, with a WD120, western digital drive it, came clean formatted, unpartitioned. I ran the Windows XP pro installer, told it to create a partition with all the unpartitioned space, then did the full NTFS format. It ran through the whole thing and when it hit 100%, gave a format failed error, saying the "drive may be damaged". I booted from a floppy and ran Fdisk, erased the partition, repartitioned, and ran a format, and it says its formatting "48,93.93 M"...that doesnt sound like the right size, but FDisk showed a partition that looked to be the right size when I created this. Is it just a bad hard drive that I should replace, or can you suggest sometthing else?

EDIT: Running WD diagnostics on the drive now...full surface scan. I'll post the results, but I'd appreciate comments. :banghead:

thanks!

[MediaMan]

You may have to use the tools to reverify the drive. You may also run the WINXP installer again and create a partition of 4-6 GB FAT 32 and then a) Try NTFS formatting or B) FAT32.

You can always use the ADMINSTRATIVE tools in the control panel (Disk Management) to partiton and format the rest NTFS or FAT32.

[TheLostSwede]

khan,

As a last resort i would try a zero-write on the disk but you shouldn´t have to do that on a new drive. If it isn´t that troublesome to Doa it, i would do that. Not good signs on a new harddrive at all. I would have a tough time trust it after that myself.