Hey guys, I've had some strange problems with a brand new Seagate 2TB drive that won't format - so I wanted to use the HDD LLC tool to see if that can help. I tried the free version, and left it on overnight, but the enxt day it was only at 3%

So I bought the full version and did the same, it was sunning at about 1.8 mb/s when I went to bed but today when I checked it was only at 3% again, although it did still seem to be running at the same high speed. I had make sure to change the power options on xp so the system did not go into standby etc.

Can anyone tell me why this is happening or if I'm doing something wrong?
Any advice appreciated
Thanks

I guess instead of "LLC" you actually mean "LLF" i.e. low-level format...? I'll assume that this is the case in this reply. I'll also assume this is an internal drive, since you haven't mentioned USB anywhere.

Based on your story, it sounds like the slow performance was not due to the speed-limiting of the free LLF tool version, and the problem is elsewhere.

Many troubleshooting approaches are possible, but there are risks that you may cause further problems during any diagnosis attempts (e.g. dropping the drive by mistake, causing ESD damage, a slip of the screwdriver ripping a component off the PCB etc). If you accept the risks then I suggest considering these areas as a start, although I'm not promising to hand-hold through the whole process, due to limited time and not knowing your skillset etc:

- What is the full history of the drive, and what problems did you have before you tried the LLF tool? Note that you should never need such a tool on a working drive, so IMHO the details of previous behaviours are likely to be helpful.

- You can use hardware substitution to help to understand where your problem is (move that drive to a different system, and/or move a different drive into your system) and see where this current behaviour continues. If this behaviour follows the drive into a known-working systen, then of course the problem would seem to be the drive, so as it's new then return it to the place of purchase (or whatever the consumer laws allow you to do over there ).

- Use utilities to gather more data e.g. gathering the full SMART data (including raw values) to see if any obvious concerns are shown, and using a read throughput tool to see if all parts of the drive read slowly, or just some parts etc.

Those are some techniques you could use to make progress on your investigation, although as I mentioned, depending on your full system configuration and other factors, other approaches are also possible.

Thanks for your reply. I'm not quite sure how exaclty but I did get it working now. I used the Gparted live disk which formatted in a few seconds and created a partition and now it works! Phew
Thanks for the help!

My experience is that if you're not sure about the real cause of a problem, then you can't be sure when you've fixed it. Therefore personally, I'd be doing more tests and probably trying to re-create the problem scenario again, in order to properly diagnose it - but it's your choice. I just hope you don't have a problem with the drive, when you've got data on it. Remember to do backups! Good luck