Vista Not Formatting second partition

[smilodon]

A couple of years ago I bought an ACER aspire 5735Z that came with vista and a HDD with two partitions. Recently I converted one partition to Fedora for a particular project that required a linux distro. When it turned out that Ubuntu would be better than Fedora for this purpose, I tried to switch to Ubuntu by overwriting the fedora and ended up with a computer that couldn't boot as I had corrupted the bootloader. I managed to fix that problem by resetting the computer to factory settings, while this overwrote some things everything was okay. However, when I tried to install the ubuntu distribution again, it said that I needed to format that particular partition first. When I tried to do it using quick format, there was an error. I am currently doing it using the long format option, but it is stuck at 99%, is there anything that I can do, or is half my hard drive now unusable?

[Lech]

Quote:

Originally Posted by smilodon

A couple of years ago I bought an ACER aspire 5735Z that came with vista and a HDD with two partitions. Recently I converted one partition to Fedora for a particular project that required a linux distro. When it turned out that Ubuntu would be better than Fedora for this purpose, I tried to switch to Ubuntu by overwriting the fedora and ended up with a computer that couldn't boot as I had corrupted the bootloader. I managed to fix that problem by resetting the computer to factory settings, while this overwrote some things everything was okay. However, when I tried to install the ubuntu distribution again, it said that I needed to format that particular partition first. When I tried to do it using quick format, there was an error. I am currently doing it using the long format option, but it is stuck at 99%, is there anything that I can do, or is half my hard drive now unusable?

It is possible that now you might have a bad sector in your HDD but you may also try a 3rd party app. to re-format this partition. One that seems to have
good marks is Easeus Partition Master Home Edition (freeware) that I believe could be downloaded from CNET.

[smilodon]

It is working now, seeming to let it sit for about a day without use made the problem go away.