I use a laptop running XPSP3, but this concerns an external hard drive about which I know nothing other than it is 120Gb.

Background:
I was given a 2nd hand external hard drive to back up my stuff. It came from a friend who got it from e-bay, but he'd been using it himself for a while and it was fine. Months and months went by, when we couldn't find the power cable, and my laptop crashed anyway and had to GO to the menders (luckily another friend - a microsoft qualified service ENGINEER - backed up everything onto his computer so I've still got all my stuff).

This is what happened:
I have finally got everything together and started to reinstall everything, and copy data to my laptop. I then tried to copy the data to the external drive. It took a few FOLDERS but then crashed. Started it up again, could open the first few folders but when I tried to open the last one it crashed again. My microsoft friend tried a quick reformat from properties (right clicking the icon), which got so FAR but failed in phase 4. While it was reformatting my friend was called away and will be gone for about a week. He had said that if the quick format didn't work, he would try the dos format command. I used to use dos a lot about 20 years ago and admittedly can't remember much, but anyway, I did it.

It started fine, but it's been stuck at 1 percent for the last 22 hours!!

The drive is a pain and obviously there's some huge problem with it. If just switching it off is the only way out of this, then I'm happy to humanely sacrifice it. If, however, there is a way of making it work, I'd rather go that route.

Thank you, and sorry it's so long.http://www.cyberwalker.com/article/454/45#reinstallxpThanks very much - excellent link, loads of stuff to try and lots to think about. Great.

(It's still stuck on 1%, but in another formatting method!). Pretty sure the disk's no good.