Legit Reviews

I am trying to format my starage drive just to start over with a clean drive. I get this " Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any disk utilities or other programs that use this drive. Make sure no window is displaying the contents of the drive. Try formating again." I am not aware of any programs that use it. Can anyone tell me how to find out which program might be using the drive so I can disable it?? Alternatively can anyone tell me how to format it with another utility that may circumvent this problem. My only goal is to have a "blank" drive to back up my data to.

P.S
I would like to have 2 sectors on the drive...one that I can allocate as a page file to speed up the system, I have heard this explained somewhere, where the heads of the drive stay in the small place allocated to the page file......the second to store once monthly system backups.

Look on the drive manufacturer's website - all of them have utilities to format and test the drives.

by sectors I think you mean partitions - you can partition the drive inside of windows after you have it formatted using the disk managenment utility in windows.

There are 3rd party apps that do partitions, but if the drive is empty, I would just use windows to do it.

Mike

Some of the utility discs from the manufacturers use a floppy disk that you reboot from. I think most of them will work inside of windows now a days, but am not positive.

Did you try formatting from the disk management utility inside of windows? or from windows explorer? With windows explorer open, windows is using the drive to dosplay inside of explorer catch-22

I hate this term but here it really is needed.... LOL ... the afforementioned page file was already set up to use the storage drive just not on a seperate partition from the rest of the data hence cannot format because its in use. I will try the windows utility to create 2 partitions on the drive. Someone here wrote of how to set up a page file on an extra drive with a limited size partition so that the read/write head of the drive is always over the right location thus speeding up the time needed to access the page file. Is this accurate and how do I do it...how large a partition do I set up etc.?

You can use "GParted" to partition any drive btw

You can put your page file on the outside edge of the drive for (slightly) better performance. The outside edge of the drive allows for quicker data access and throughput as the drives heads move less and the data under them is moving quicker.
To do this, you'll need to delete (or move) your existing partitions and then create a small ~1GB NTFS partition first and reboot the pc. This new partition by default will be at the outside edge of your HDD. Then create the page file; r-click my computer, goto properties, click advanced. Select the hdd with windoze installed and select "no pagefile", then select the new partition and set the page file manually to what ever size you like.

Remember you can only have up to 4 primary partitions on a HDD.

I'd suggest you try downloading the Tweaking Companion from http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html .
It might just answer your questions about your page file and answer other questions like this in the future.