I'm having difficulties formatting my hard drive. Here's the deal: I have 2 drives in this machine which i've recently rebuilt. In the previous configuration, these drives were RAID striped. In my new configuration, I no longer have RAID capabilities, so I simply have 2 hard drives on the system. The first formatted fine when I installed Windows XP. The second drive will not format under windows. Windows simply tells me that the format operation could not be completed. Under the command prompt, the format operation terminates, telling me the all NTFS boot sectors are unwriteable.

Could this problem be due to the fact that this drive was once 1/2 of a RAID striped volume?

One note: at the beginning of the format operation, the drive shows a capacity of 76342MB, which was the capacity of the old striped volume. This is actually only a 40GB drive.

System Config:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+
MSI K7N2Delta (nForce 2 chipset)
Western Digital WD400BB-75CLB0 40GB drive x2
Windows XP Pro w/ SP2

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Have you tried a disk software program like MaxBlast? Although made by Maxtor for use with their hard drives, I've found it works on a NEC drive I have. With one drive up and OS written to it, simply install the program and choose to make your second drive for "data storage". The program doesn't allow the reformating & partitioning of the primary drive, anyway. Doing this then allows you to choose your file system, easy GUI creation of partitions & will also reveal the present status of the drive... might give you a clue. When it works, it does the fdisk function itself... follows with what you chose as partitions and rather quickly performs the task. Maxblast 3 for windows download. Check the site for other options, too.