Formatting a second hand hard disk ?

Having placed a second hand (3GB) hard disk drive into my PC (which was working fine in an old PC) booted from a W98 floppy drive (drive picked up in BIOS) ran fdisk to create a primary DOS partition and then ran format c: The disk proceeded to format up to around 75% then returned with “trying to recover allocation unit 539,359” and the numer began slowy counting…and counting with no end in site. Is it doing something useful or is the disk no use ?