And the wierdness continues...

[sublimnl]

My original problem was that none of my HDD's would power up despite trying with 2 different network adapters and 2 different PS2's. After getting fed up with that I got real ghetto tonight and took apart one of the network adapters, grabbed an old PC I had laying around and powered the HDD up using a spare molex from the PC and then connected the HDD to the PS2 from there....FINALLY HDLoader, HDAdvance, and the ***3 HDD tools all see my hard disk!

NOW my problem is that I cannot finish formatting the damn thing. The drive is a 120GB Maxtor, known to be compatible. The orange light stays on for about 30 secs and then the system just sits there (left it for 3 hours at one point) and says "Formatting is in progress... please wait". The process never finishes and the HDD activity light stays off. I cannot reboot the PS2 by tapping the power button, instead I have to hold it down for 5 secs to power down...it seems that the system is hung.

Any suggestions as to what to try from here?


EDIT: Different behavior this morning (WTF), now HDLoader and HDAdvance both say format failed after about 20 seconds. ***3 HDD tools says format successful and then an error that says something like "Unable to read file system" or something to that effect. What gives?