Drive format could not complete

Try a known good HD and go from there.
If you do not have such, take your system to a service place. You already spent enough time.

I experienced the same thing, and it was a failure in the DMA chip on the MOBO. The system would not format past 250MB at first, and it gradually grew smaller and smaller until it failed completely.. A new drive did not cure it so I moved the drive to another machine formatted there, and when I returned it to the original system, all looked fine, but would freeze loading WINXPSP2. Try the drive in another unit to confirm the drive is not at fault.

You can also try testing the drive.

Most drive manufactures have utilities available on their web sites that perform pretty thorough testing on the drive.

Chas

I have connected the drive to my laptop and my pc. I still recieve the message format can not complete.

You probably think this solution is too much trouble for what it is worth (free)...but here goes: Get a Win 98 bootable CD. (Full Version does it.)Boot into it, and choose to format in Win 98 to the drive (C:), or use FDISK to force a format of partitions. Partions are expectedly 2-8 Gigs, and make as many as you need. Sorry, if it's a large drive. Run the drive under Win XP, and collapse the partitions into a single. Lots of work, I know; just a suggestion, if having trouble making a large partition in Win XP, which is concerning.

There are programs that manage partitions, in order to collapse them or format, have a look around. EX: Partition Magic. Either that or have the drive tested by a shop 1st. Maybe they can format it for a few bucks. (The easiest solution.)