What does this message mean?!?!?!?

[wilbur]

After I fdisk my hard drive, i then format it by "format c: /s"
and then I get this message:

Formatting 19,23.02M
Trying to recover allocation unit 513,213 *and counting*


This has been going on for over 2 hours now.
So what's going on?

[muchmark]

It means your drive has bad sectors. I would run scandisk and have it mark the bad sectors before doing anything.

[Psycho Logical]

The FORMAT program has encountered a faulty cluster and is trying to recover or get past it.

You could stop the format with Esc or Ctrl-C, and then run ScanDisk in thorough mode.

[wilbur]

Does anyone of you know how long will this thing last?

And what will happen if I were not to run scandisk?

[kriegunder]

If you don't you may have problems if you install windows

[Psycho Logical]

You might just as well interrupt (stop) the format. It will do nothing as far as correcting the problem anyway, even it it does finish.

ScanDisk will map any bad clusters to the FAT, preventing them from being used, unless the bad ones are in the boot sectors. Then the HD is a goner.

[wilbur]

Alright, I interrupted the format by pressing the ctrl alt del because when I pressed either the esc or the crtl - c key, nothing happened. So, I then typed scandisk and it just scanned the A drive, and I think that's not what I want, so then I did "scandisk c:" but the message I recieved said something like "scandisk cannot be run because the c drive is on a network drive or cd-rom."

So does this mean I need to replace my HD?

[jmichna]

Wilbur,
You should be able to go to the website of your HD's manufacturer. Most manufacturers have utilities to test, identify and mark (so as not to be used) bad sectors. D/L the utility, follow the directions, then you should be good to partition and format the hard drive.
As an example, IBM has a "drive fitness tool, DFT ver. 230" that I recently used to test and identify bad sectors, and mark as bad, to keep using my daughter's IBM GXP75 hard drive (after re-partitoning and re-formating) .
Good luck,
jmichna

[wilbur]

Alrighty then...thanks for each and everyone of your advices people!