Carl,

Have you verified that the drive settings in the BIOS match what is on the
drive?  If the cylinders, heads, and sectors do not match, the BIOS may
still see the drive after a boot.  If, however, these settings are not
correct, properly formatting the hard drive will be near impossible.

I had similar problems to this with drives installed in Compaq Deathpro
2000s.  The number of cylinders was off by two (moral:  never trust Compaq
to auto detect anything correctly), and the drive would get to about 80%
formatted and then start getting that "trying to recover allocation unit"
error.  It would eventually format the whole drive, but it would take a
couple of hours, and a good portion of the drive would be marked with bad
tracks.  Getting into the BIOS and correcting the error fixed the problem.

Hope this helps!

Kyle Elmblade
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From: "Carl Barnhart" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 13, 2000 3:44 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] formatting problems


> I just built my computer and I partitioned the hard drive. I tried to
format
> my hard drive but once it hits 1 percent complete I get an error that
reads:
>
> Trying to recover allocation unit
>
> Not Ready
> format terminated
>
> What is the problem and how can I format my hard drive and get windows 98
> installed?
>
> Carl Barnhart

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