I bought a Rock External Hard Drive 400GB (SATA) some time ago for home recording. When I set the drive up, my computer recognizes it, starts the formatting process, but never finishes. It takes a while and has a quiet clicking sound during the formatting process, which makes me think it's doing something, but right at the end an error comes up that just says it's unable to format drive. I've looked for information on the maker, but it's hard to find anything. The specs are:

-USB 2.0 & USB 1.1 Compatible
-USB Cable & 100v - 240v Adapter Included
-Supports MAC OS 8.6+ and Windows 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP, & Vista

The Drive Parameters are:
7200 RPM
ATA 300
16MB BUF

5VDC
12VDC


A computer friend of mine suggested trying a SATA/IDE Converter, but that might not change anything. Any suggestions? Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks!!

This post has been edited by anjilinexile: Oct 16 2009, 06:03 PM

Hi anjilinexile and welcome to Geeks to Go.

Lets see if we can resolve your problem.
The clicking noise bothers me. You probably have a bad drive.
Lets see if we can find out the manufacturer of the drive. There are a couple ways to do this. And since your computer recognises it,we should get lucky.
Some things to try to identify the drive manufacturer.
1. Go to my computer and right click on a drive and choose properties. If there, list what drives you have.or
2. Go to start...run...type in devmgmt.msc....expand out the disk drive section. List what you have.

You should also see it listed during boot up.

When we know the manufacturer, we can try and use the drive manufacturers diagnostics to verify the integrity of the drive.