Unable to format hard drive

[ms792]

I have been given a Toshiba laptop which has been left turned on when the battery has gone dead. The hard drive was unreadable, and on attempting to format it, I get the message 'Trying to recover allocation unit' and a number, which increases slowly up to about 15000 and then stops. I have tried running fdisk and partitioning the drive, and have been able to produce a small partition (10Mb) which formats ok. Has anyone any good ideas?

[eyesee]

sounds like the parameters for the hard drive arent set up correclty in the system BIOS
If the battery went dead its almost a certainty that the settings are incorrect

[ms792]

OK, thanks for that, however, I have tried the latest flash bios from Toshiba's website, which loaded successfully and hasn't made any difference. Still looking!

[eyesee]

no MS792
you misunderstood
I didnt say anything about flashing the BIOS I said that the hard drive parameters are not set up correctly
In simple terms, the system does not know how to talk to it

[ms792]

Point taken , but I have also run the tsetup DOS program for setting the bios and it won't allow any changes to the hard drive settings. I presume it must detect them automatically, although this does seem surprising on such an old machine. I am no frther forward.