Formatting Harddrive

[stalker11]

I have a 200gb Western Digital Harddrive. I want to format it, but Windows XP doesn't do it. When I go to format through the "My Computer", I set it to NTFS, 512 bytes (per sector) and try to do a regular format. Windows doesn't even touch the harddrive, I left it on for about 20 minutes and the bars weren't going, so I cancelled it and all the files were still on the drive. I have been able to do a quick format before, but I don't really want to do that because last time I did I lost a nice chunk of files because the drive failed. I also tried going through the "Disk Management" in "Administrative Tools", also no luck.
Does anyone know a program that can do this?

Also, the reason why I formatted the drive was because it had over 60gb used. The files were nowhere to be found on the drive using Windows' explorer. Diskeeper however showed that the space was used by system files. I never had any OS on this drive, nor did I use it myself for any system related purposes. Only video editing and storage. Has anyone had this issue?

[RabidDog]

you cant format the drive windows is running from (normally C: )

[stalker11]

I guess I forgot to mention that it didn't have Windows on it. But I did mention that it wasn't being used for any system related purposes. And the drive does format, it just doesn't do a regular format, it does a quick format. I am actually scanning the drive for errors right now and it locked the drive completely. The drive now shows up as though there is no partition on it, and the disk scan is also frozen at "Phase 5". I am using the disk scan utility built into Windows.

[redwudz]

Delete the partitions on it first, make a new partition, then reformat. (Not quick)

[stalker11]

I did that already.
First I tried formatting normally, then cancelled it shortly and all files remained on the drive as if it were untouched.
Then I deleted the partition, drive was empty.
Then I tried formatting it, (not quick). It didn't format. Then I eventually did a quick format which worked, but windows screws up when i run scan disk. And Windows doesn't even want to format, just freezes, but i can cancel.

[budz]

get the western digital utility to test the drive out and use it to format the drive.
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=3&swid=3