I have a WD1200 SATA disc which will not allow a new installation of Windows or the restoration of a system image.
I had been messing about with various back up programs and at one point Windows told me that the disc was offline because it had an identity clash.
Having fixed that using Diskpart, I now have a disc which seems to be perfectly usable in all respects except I cannot load Windows onto it, nor will it allow me to restore a system image. Windows simply tells me that there is no suitable disk, without any clue as to why.
I have downloaded the HD Low Level Format tool and run that. I get a succession of "Format Error occured at offset nnn,nnn,nnn,nnn" messages and the disc is left untouched, even though the program says it has been formatted.Any ideas as to what may be happening?
I'm well out of my depth here.

Could be 2 problems

1 - disk has some issue on it maybe PW locked not sure from what you are saying on this one or physical problems and needs to be RMA

2 - you mother board has a SATA driver on it older MB had to have F6 installed on it and loaded in order to see a SATA HDD on it and load windows.

I am thinking more on the first one is your problem on this and you need a new disk or RMA this one.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Thanks for the response Iorana.
I have now managed to resolve the issue by connecting the problem disk to a SATA port in the PC and have used "Diskpart" to sort it out.
Selecting the problem disk and using "clean all" seems to clear the problem.
The field "Free" (when using the "list disk" command) was previously showing zero, but now shows a value and the disk is fully functional.
Panic over!