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Dimension 4700 - New System Drive WON"T Format!
I am helping a friend with this system. His hard drive is shot and I replaced it with an identical Seagate 40GB SATA drive. I began to install Windows XP on it and it went through many steps until it got to format the drive. It has been hanging at 0% formatted for almost 3 hours. This just doesn't make sense to me. I have installed virtually hundreds of window OS on new PCs and have never run into this problem. Is there anyone out there that can help me with this?
osprey4
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December 8th, 2010 09:00
Hi Dkeim,
Is the SATA port turned on in the BIOS? Are you sure the drive is good?
DKeim
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December 9th, 2010 10:00
The SATA port is set ON.
speedstep
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8 Wizard
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December 10th, 2010 05:00
I'm not aware of 40 gig SATA drives as standard in Dell only Western Digital PATA drives that must be set to cable select.
Seems to me its a Parallell ata Drive with 80 wire flat grey ribbon cable not a narrow blue or black SATA Data cable.
rdunnill
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December 10th, 2010 18:00
Newegg doesn't even list 40gb SATA drives.Were SATA drives ever made in that size, which I recall as being popular eight or nine years ago?
DKeim
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December 11th, 2010 19:00
Well, this 40GB drive was purchased with the Dell computer. It has NO flat grey ribbon, but does have a narrow blue SATA Data cable. The drive that I purchased is an identical one that was in the computer. I guess the point that I am trying to make is that regardless of the size, name brand we should be able to format the drive during the install of Windows OS. The original OS on this box was XP Home Edition. My friend cannot find the OS cd that must have come with the computer when he purchased it.
The computer recognizes the drive just fine and placing an install cd walks through first parts of the install. IT just STOPS when starts to format the drive. I have installed 100's of these on other computers with new drives. This is the firs time that I have run into this. Could there be something that is built into the Dell mother board that won't allow this?
DKeim
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December 11th, 2010 19:00
It took me a while to locate a replacement drive, but did find it. Like I said, this is an IDENTICAL drive.