IDE harddisk crash?

[BarbershopJohn]

I have three h/disks c,d,e. E is causing me problems it's 1gig and won't format past 78%, so I fdisk'd and created two partition hopefully to partition off the bad part, but now the 800meg won't format past 68%. Any suggestions apart from bin the drive. tks

------------------
BarbershopJohn

[Byteman]

I've had a stubborn drive that wouldn't format- was a Compaq laptop and the battery pack was bad, would not recharge in long time when plugged into AC outlet, if this is the case, might be what is wrong. After charging for 2 days, it formatted all the way with no problem, but would not charge no way to full. If you have a tower/desktop, the drive could be on the way somewhere else... does CHKDSK or SCANDISK have anything to say about the drive? There are diagnostic checkers from manufacturer or 3rd party that may spot something, too. I have used OnTrack's Data Advisor on occaision... worked great for checking drive and file structure, it's free but wants you to buy later on, think it was 30 day free trial.Good luck, post back if you find anything we can help with.
Note: Try looking for bad sectors using DOS scandisk from Command prompt. Displays all the sectors, marks bad ones, time for new drive if there are many, although drive may work for some time...just risky. I have one in a spare machine that has about five bad.
Western Digital, owner gave it to me after they tipped over computer, started with one bad area a year ago, one pops up from time to time, getting ready to replace it. Then, guess there are low level formats you can do on some drives, but that is chancy, too. Saw a thread sometime just last week about all that. Can use utility to write zeros to entire drive, I did one once, works fine a year later. (IBM 15gig, had bad virus on a Gateway) ------------------
The Search archives on this board contain about 60,000,000 dollars worth of information- load it all on your spare computer and use it to fix the other one.

[This message has been edited by Byteman (edited 02-10-2002).]

[This message has been edited by Byteman (edited 02-10-2002).]

[BarbershopJohn]

tks Byteman, yes I tried the usual scandisk both from dos and from win98se but they just hung at that point. I mean the thorough testing of the drive not just the files etc. Previous to me trying to fix this E drive the whole pc crashed and the C drive, for whatever reason was not designated as LBA and I got a warning before I did the scandisk the first time I actually got back onto C via start up disk, after virus checking ofcourse. I did initially ignore this LBA warning as I thought nothing could have changed by settings, surely! But later when I was finding all sorts of odd things I check the bios settings and it was set to 'auto' so I reset it to LBA and then was eventually able to reload win98. But E poses a problem. Its not a big problem since I only really use this PC for some temp storage and games for the misses when I'm using the main pc. regards Barbershop John.

------------------
BarbershopJohn

[Byteman]

Glad to know it's not that an important a drive for your system- good example of why it pays to use partitioning or extra drives for those who's lives depend on them!
Wonder if your drive's data could be at least accessed/ copied down to another if you try restoring the Master Boot Record in FDISK- [oops-wouldn't have one if "e"] try also setting the drive parameters manually in BIOS, cylinder-head-sector, and size right or close to it...then detect the drive. Some also use Normal setting in BIOS. I had to try formatting about six times, each time it went a bit farther, that drive is working fine today!
If youve had enough of fixing for that 1 gig, toss it to a charitable place or a person who likes to monkey around with old stuff if you can. Thanks for posting back, glad to TRY to help!

------------------
The Search archives on this board contain about 60,000,000 dollars worth of information- load it all on your spare computer and use it to fix the other one.

[This message has been edited by Byteman (edited 02-12-2002).]