slooooww ntfs format – 1389 days old

[Michael_Horatio]

putting together a very cheap box for a needy friend here and using a lot of old spares I had laying around (MB and 2gig Intel dual core are new)

I am using a sata 500 gig seagate that I haven't used for over a year, but was fine when I retired it I think. there were 6 or 7 partitions on it - some Linux some ntfs.
Deleted all of them before formatting ntfs (not a quick format)

It is going very slowly. I am just formatting 100 gigs for a C drive and it is at about 85 percent after two and a half hours or a little more than that. It's going steady, no speed ups or slow downs just slow. Would that raise any red flags to anyone? would it indicate a lot of bad sectors?
I have half a dozen spare IDE drives around so easy to switch.
I'll let it finish and start an XP install and see how it does.

just sort of thinking out loud here...

[BitBender]

PSU issue? I had one act that way and it was a PSU - I'd think there'd be some messages of there were that many bad sectors.

But, I am guessing, tbh wif ya... All I could say was to pull the mfg'rs disk diagnose utility and run that puppi... But, it is a semengate

[Michael_Horatio]

Thanks Bits, well no problem, turns out the drive must be screwed somewhere along the line.
It appeared to finish the format (got to 100% then sat for a minute and then coughed up the
"Windows could not install to the partition - failed to format the partition - drive may be damaged.

good enough for me.. I put another known good WD IDE drive in and all is well now.
For years I always bought Seagates because they used to be really reliable and among the quietest drives around, but have stayed away from them for along time now. I think the quality control has slipped way below the average. Seems so for me anyway..