Reformat Question
 

Reformat Question
I bought an external 80gig Maxtor hard drive (firewire) about 8 months ago for backing up my system during a complete reformat/system upgrade. Everything went smoothly. I got lucky though because briefly after I reloaded all of my backed-up files, the drive crashed and forced me to reformat it (the maxtor drive). I would reformat it over and over and it kept on failing. I forget now what would happen, maybe it wouldn't complete formatting, maybe it would and want to again when I tried to save new things.
I'm about to reload XP for music production optimization and I need to back things up. I pulled out the maxtor to see if it worked now (maybe it was clashing with old drivers or something.) It prompted me to format it so I selected Quick Format. Ater 20 seconds it was done and it now is working. I ran all of the disk checks it has (including Norton's) and everything is fine. I'm a little afraid though. I'm thinking about doing a complete (not quick) reformat and I'm wondering what Allocation Size Unit is. Is a certain unit size more likely to fail than another...? What about for optimizing simple backups?
Thanks guys
-Tim

What you need is Partition Magic will tell you everyting about you hard drives partition and SpinRite 5 will tell you if the hard drives ok to use. Check them out their both good programs and if all else fails just low level format the drive.

I don't see why he needs Partition Magic for a simple hard drive format.

Also, a low level format his HIGHLY risky, you actually risk the chance of damaging the hard drive. I've formatted hundreds of times and only once was a low level format needed. It was a last ditch effort to revive a dead drive and I was lucky it worked!

As far as cluster sizes are concerned, the default setting (4k) should be fine. You don't really need anything larger unless you are doing a lot of video editing or moving large files.

it might be a messed up drive, try using a utility like memtest also if u get it up and running