When I format the drive on 3 of my compaq SFF 733 mhz computers, the machine is formating up to 80% and then it starts showing allocation problems. After the format is complete it shows 1530 mb of bad sectors. Any drive I put in the compaq shows the identicle number of bad sectors. I thought the drives were bad but I took a couple of IBMs and formatted the same drive and they format perfectly with no bad sectors. I don't get it. Have any ideas? Memory??

That seems like an old computer. Did you recently upgrade the HD in any of them?

What are you using to reformat your drives?

In all of my machines, I first run fdisk and partition large, and then use startup disk to format the drive.

Originally Posted by computertech48

In all of my machines, I first run fdisk and partition large, and then use startup disk to format the drive.

What do you use to FDISK? Win98 Floppy? Or a third party app? What OS are you using? WinME by any chance?
~Ana

Put in and XP disk. Boot from it. Hit recovery console.

Type in "diskpart"