Hard Drive Not Formating!

hey all, so i had a huge problem in this thread here http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?p=1275363#post1275363

now that i have resolved the vista error by using a new drive i want to try and figure out whats up with the old hdd. Its a samsung 500gb HD501LJ, i had previously manged to update the firmware for the drive.

Now i have this connected to my XP SVC PK 3 pc, i have tried to reformat in xp but it gets to 100% and then says format has failed, no other error messages, checked event viewer for any logs and nothing recorded there. When i click on the hdd it says the hdd is not formatted. I have installed acronis disk suite to try and partiton it and format but even this fails. When looking at the drives properties it says that the file system is none and it says something about the disc being 0x6 FAT 16. I tried to ntfs it but it failed. I tried the samsung hdd utilities and it did a diagnostics check which comes back as being ok. I even tried a low level format using the hdd utilities and it said that it was formatted. I then tried to install win xp on to the drive as i know it would then automatically format the drive but setup failed!!

I did a quick test using spinrite and even this said the hdd was ok.

I have googled for possible solutions but none have come up. Something tells me that by using the acronis disk editor i may be able to fix the disc as apparently you can change the HEX keys or something like that but i really am not capable of doing it by myself. I have thought about RMA to samsung but it would be difficult to get and rma as their utilities say the disc is a ok!!!:confused

 

could be a bad firmware update?

Sometimes the manufacturers tools just seem to not work correctly (Samsung raid is my nightmare)
I have found that Gparted works well and is available here.
http://majorgeeks.com/GParted_d5757.html

Sounds to me as if the MBR area got corrupted and needs to be cleaned out. If the drive scans/passes (on several diff progs) then it points to a software error of some sort.

Justafewideasuponawakening