Formatting Hard Drive

If it really is a 1.2 gig hard drive, it's fairly old. During formatting, bad sectors are being encountered and are either being fixed or marked as bad. If it's happening over and over again, it may take quite a while, and you may find total disk space after format to be less than 1,218.62mb. You may then be able to load Windows, but odds are the drive will continue to fail. I would recommend buying a new hard drive sooner rather than later, when you also risk losing data.

During setup Scandisk has found bad sectors on the drive
It is attempting to move the bad sectors to the end of drive so they will be rendered urepairable,thus the process will take considerable time,you can proceed to fix error or consider putting in another drive.

You better replace the disk.
Disks are not very expensive now and you are gonna win a lot more space (30 or 40 GB?).
The errors in the bad sectors will make this "problematic" disk to become a source of problems. Remember that if you finish the formating process and install the OS, it is 99.99% sure that the system will crash in the worst moment (when you have all your data without backup and in the exact moment you more need it).
If you want some advice about how to change your drive for a new one just letme know and I will be happy helping you!

Jose P. Mir

While it does sound like the drive is toast, verify a couple of things first. Look at the drive and write down the heads, sectors, and cylinders. Then check your bios and makes sure the settings are the same. If not, change them and try again. If they are the same, pitch the drive.
Good Luck.

If you want to format without Format going through the lost allocation unit information, use the /Q switch for a Quick format. Since those clusters are already marked bad, there isn't any reason to relook at them. The Quick Format just 0 (Zeros) the FAT and you are ready to go.

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