Background
I had an unformatted unitialised 500GB HD, and I decided that it needed formatting to NTFS. It's bare disk but it is convenient for me to connect through an external adapter (known good). So I enter DiskManagement, an initialize the disk without any problem. Then I start formatting using the format wizard. I accept all the defaults except I enter a new disk label. The format process starts and I leave it because it will take some time (I know because I have done it before)
Additional information: I ran WinDLG and looked only at the top level screen, everything looked normal, notably that SMART passed (large green tick)
Problem
I left it for a few hours and it said 'Formatting (38%)', so I left it overnight...in the morning it said 'Formatting (39%)' . This is not right and it is too slow (now it has reached 41%). It will take a couple of months to format at this rate. So I want to interrupt the format, and try a surface scan using HDTune. How can I do this without causing (further ?) damage to the disk ? I've tried ejecting the disk but it says, unsurprisingly, that it's busy. All applications are 'running' and the CPU and memory usage is low (<600MB)
System I am using
HP Pavilion a405.uk - m/b MSI MS-6577 v3.1 - Celeron 2.53GHz - 2 x 512MB RAM - 80GB HDD - Windows XP/SP3 Home (32 bit)
