I've got a WD 80 GB hard drive I'm having trouble formatting. Does anyone know of a few good programs that can deal with picky drives?

Partition Magic only got about 50% of the way formatted but stopped due to an unknown error.

Thanks.

Your best bet is the WD tools. Download DataLifeGuard for DOS and run the long tests on the drives, then format. There's no such thing as a "picky" hard drive, it's either good or bad.

This would be a good place to start.

I used that to check the drive out but ran into errors on various sectors. Now it's not even being recognized. Oh well. It doesn't have anything important on it, I was just checking to see if I could repair it.

Thanks.

Use the CD that came with the drive or else use Acronis.

Sounds like the hdd is unusable to you at this point.
Recommend using a little gem of a utility (freeware version works great)...
KillDisk...
It has enabled me to resurrect a few hdds that were "dead".
True, especially of the kids' hdds...

Anyway, the program runs in dos. You may be able to run it from the command prompt now since they've added features. I always use a ms-dos boot disk and have never had an issue.
It's a watered-down version of the DoD's app for destroying data and will write 1 pass 0's to your hdd.
Be certain you have the correct hdd selected or unplug the non-selected hdds.

Once killdisk does it's thing, you'll have to format the hdd to recover it.

Good luck man.

Use a XP CD and boot into "Emergency Enviroment" or whatever they call it and use format?
//Danne