A bad hard drive?

To continue... I did used the Samsung utility to do a low level
format on this hard thinking that if I installed a new hard drive the
Microsoft wizard would automatically initialize this drive. No such
luck!

I looked at the help instructions again and they read. "right-click
the disk you want to initialize and then click initialize disk" You
can right-click all day and that initialize disk option will not show
up! It was only by accident that I right-clicked on the box next to
the box showing the hard drive and this Initialize option showed up.

I thought that Microsoft programmers would follow certain standards
with their menus so that things are easy to find, like select the
disk, click on the ACTION menu and you should see all the possible
actions you can take. You should not have to search around with your
mouse in a window like some idiot looking for the right spot to click!

Ak


On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 21:54:17 -0700, Alfred Kaufmann
<al_kaufmann DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:

>I did find a Samsung Hard Drive utility to check out this drive and it
>reports my hard drive has NO errors. I still have no idea how to
>initialize this drive.
>
>Al
>
>
>On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:14:54 -0700, Alfred Kaufmann
><al_kaufmann DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>>I had my Vista Home Premium 64bit running on a stripped raid setup
>>using two Samsung 80GB drives. I was getting lots of odd behavior and
>>file corruption so I replaced both hard drives and my system is
>>running very smooth right now.
>>
>>I decided to use a Seagate DOS utility to check out the Samsung drives
>>and both passed the long read test. However when I started up Vista
>>to format and use these hard drives I ran into a problem. Vista
>>showed the one drive as "not initialized" and there is no way I can
>>see to initialize this drive. Is there a way to initlialize this
>>drive or should I send it for replacement?
>>
>>Also does anyone know if Samgsung provides a DOS utility for checking
>>out their hard drives?
>>
>>The second drive seems fine and is formatting as I type.
>>
>>Al
>>

Finally I found someone with the same problem and a resolution.
I am running vista Home Premium 64 and I recently bought a 500gb drive to use as an external backup.
Side Note: I accidently ordered the sata II version instead of the IDE, ooops. Instead of shipping it back I decided to just buy a different external enclosure for it. Newegg had a real nice all aluminum one for $16, real nice.
So I hooked it all up today and ran into this initialize problem. And sure enough if you go to help from Computer Management in Vista it says to right click on the drive and choose initialize. Like you said Alfred,

"You can right-click all day and that initialize disk option will not show
up!"

It took me a few minutes to figure out exactly where you clicked accidently finding the option.
For those who run into this problem Alfred is referring to the small box on the left of the main block for the drive, the one that shows the drive number and size. Right-click there and you get your INITIALIZE. YAAAAAAA!
After initialization I had no problems with the Create Simple Volume option.
Now I can finally use my drive!

for those to help find these posts:
the operation cannot be completed because the disk is not initialized
thx Al!