exFAT to NTFS formatting troubles

Question

I recently ran a chkdsk on 2.5" 230GB SATA HDD but the plug was pulled before the end of the chkdsk and since then it wouldn't boot up.

Deciding to scrap all data on the HDD (no longer needed it), I then fitted it into an external HDD caddy and (in diskpart) cleaned the disk, created new partition and volume and tried to format it to NTFS. It couldn't do this on long or short formats and so I went with the less-appreciated alternative - exFAT (I run Win7). It quick formats to exFAT fine but encounters errors during long format. At the moment it is exFAT.

Of course I would really like it to be NTFS as I will probably need to use it on Win XP too.

Could anyone suggest a method of trying to reformat to NTFS? Do you think that, when chkdsk was interrupted first time, the disk was corrupted and is irretrievable? I find this situation slightly odd, as it HAS formatted to exFAT and DOES seem to work when I copy files across!

Also, I CAN use disk management console to create several partitions: e.g. a 50GB partition and then a large 180GB partition. The 50GB and WILL long-format to NTFS but the 180GB will not! I'm thinking hardware fault, but then I notice that it WILL format to exfAT! Much confusion!

Solution

I suspect that the reason NTFS did not format, but exFAT did involves the on disk structures of each. NTFS wants to use areas from the middle of the disk for the Master File Table, and this is likely where it ran into bad sectors and failed the format. exFAT would not be looking there on quick format.

Comments

[kreemoweet]

Why would the ntfs format fail, other than for disk hardware errors?

[user1083734]

I am currently trying to long-format the whole drive to exFAT again and then I will retry format to NTFS.

[Ro-ee]

With today’s disk sizes, it’s not true anymore that NTFS uses areas from the middle of the disk for the MFT. If the disk is large enough, the MFT is usually placed at 3GB into the partition. This doesn’t make your point invalid though, it could simply be that that area is faulty.