"Windows was unable to complete the format." Help!

Hello. I'm trying to format one of my two hard drives in NTFS with Windows 7 64-bit, but I receive the error message:

Code:

 
Windows was unable to complete the format.

I installed a new 1TB SATA drive yesterday along with a 120GB HDD (IDE) which I already had. After installing Windows 7 on the new 1TB and backing up all of my AppData and documents from my original 120GB, I tried to reformat the old disk and received this error.

Since the installation of Windows 7 on the 1TB, I also changed the drive letters of both disks and did so in both of the installed operating systems. They do not match each other. This is what I fear may be the cause of the problem.

On a side note, I ran "chkdsk" in the cmd and received:

Code:

 
Access Denied as you do not have suffficient privileges.
You have to invoke this utility running in elevated mode.

I'm guessing this means I have to run the cmd in an administator mode somehow? My account is an administrator, but I don't know how to run the cmd this way, so could someone explain to me how to do this?

Anyway if anyone knows how I can fix this, I'd really appreciate some help! Thanks.

Can you post a screen shot of Disk management?
https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...en-forums.html

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Golden said:

Hi,

To run chkdsk as an administrator do the following:

1. Click Start Orb, type cmd in the search box.
2. Right-click on cmd, and choose "Run as adminstrator", then hit enter.
3. Now type chkdsk /f, and hit enter.

Regards,
Golden

Awesome, thanks. Not sure if I'll need to use it yet, but good to know.

As for my disk management, here's a screenshot of the whole window:



And here's what it looks like when I attempt to format the disk:



As you can see, there isn't actually an option to format the 120GB from my disk management window. The only way I've attempted to format the disk is straight from explorer.

Your Disk Management screenshot is showing you may be Dual booting, & have NO C: HD drive.
Therefore your D: is the boot drive & can not be formated.

Because you installed to new HD with old HD plugged in, it configured a Dual Boot placing the System files on the old HD. You need to recover the boot files into the new install by running Repairs with the old HD unplugged.

Once you swap the 1tb to DISK0, set as first HD to boot in BIOS setup then run 3 startup repairs from DVD/Repair CD until it starts on its own, you can plug back in the smaller HD as DISK1 to wipe it with Diskpart Clean All command: Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

Thanks guys for all your helpful replies. I got really busy and ended up forgetting about this thread. I went back to another solution I had found earlier, though, and when I tried it everything worked perfectly. Here's the link:

Switching my Windows 7 Boot Disk from D to C with BCDBoot rather than BCDEdit - Scott Hanselman

I think that was a lot easier that unplugging any of my HDDs or running disk repairs and stuff. Thanks again! haha

Yes , much quicker - commands are the way to go.

You might still want to set the HD containing windows ( Disk1 ) as first in bios order - saves bios checking the other hd first.