Hard Drive problem

[lawbadman]

Hello Guys,

I need a little help here, I got myself in trouble.
I was installing Windows 2000 and got impatient and turned off the PC while the hard drive was being formated . As a result the boot sector got messed up.

I put the hard drive in a working PC to try and format it but it proved unsuccessful. Norton Partitionmagic did nothing either.

Does anyone know how to restore the hard drive to working order?????


Thanks all

[Zen Mod]

did you tried deleting of partition(s) and making it again?

if yes- your HD is probably physically damaged;
try to download HD utility proggie from manufacturer site , to be sure

[BHTX]

lawbadman,

What did you use when attempting to format the first time, before going to Partition Magic? The Win2k disc?

edit: If you haven't done so already...when attempting to format from the CD-ROM, do NOT choose Quick Format. Choose the other option instead.

Were you not doing a clean format/install of Win2k when you turned it off and the MBR became corrupt? You should be able to simply reboot the pc and boot from the CD-ROM (might have to change boot sequence in BIOS to read from the disc before it attempts to load an OS from the hard drive, which is no big deal...takes like 5 seconds). If you had to change the boot order, save and exit the BIOS, which should reboot your PC. Afterwards, the Win2k installation CD-ROM should automatically start (might take a minute, just be patient before turning off your PC again, thinking something is wrong). Once it's done doing its thing and prompts you for input, just do what it says to delete the current partition, then format to NTFS, then reinstall. Your drive shouldn't be physically damaged at all, unless it just completely fried it and rendered it useless when you powered off, but I doubt that's the case. It is very possible though, however. And since this situation occurred during a format, the backup bootsector is likely gone, so that's probably not an option.

[jleaman]

how about, Boot froma 3.5" floppy with win98 from bootdisk.com and run fdisk /mbr TADA

then run fdisk
then remove all partitions then add them. WOAH,,


At least your running windows 2000 and not vista

What type of hard drive is it ?

I know maxtor and seagate make a disk you can download and use to do this all too.


Jase

[lawbadman]

I changed the boot up sequence so it booted up from the win2k cd and not the HD, so the win2k installation started up and everything.
But it still takes forever to format the HD. Over a 17 hour period it only got to 15% and I got tired of waiting and shut it down.
I know it really is not suppose to take this long to format a HD even though its brand new.

Anyone know of a faster way to format this thing or did I just get a bad HD?

[jleaman]

Originally posted by lawbadman
I changed the boot up sequence so it booted up from the win2k cd and not the HD, so the win2k installation started up and everything.
But it still takes forever to format the HD. Over a 17 hour period it only got to 15% and I got tired of waiting and shut it down.
I know it really is not suppose to take this long to format a HD even though its brand new.

Anyone know of a faster way to format this thing or did I just get a bad HD?

what kinda hard drive is it ?

Go to manufacturers website and download there tool, 17 hours wow that sounds lower then a low level format, there is something wrong, sounds like you need to make a bootdisk for windows 98 and boot off it and type in fdisk /mbr

www.bootdisk.com make a 3.5" floppy boot disk use window98 disk nothing else.

this should cure it, but first id start with the manufactures disk.

[Chartal]

I think he bought a 1 Tera hard drive.

Try to partitioned a small size like 20-30 Gb and see the time it's take.

[Netlist]

A good and advanced disk manager is Bootit:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html
Take your time to read the help files though.

/Hugo

[peace brainerd]

I just know I'm gonna get shouted down for this... happens every time. But if you want to be quite certain that there is no vestige of trouble on the drive before rebooting with the win98 boot floppy and then proceeding to FDISK then run a program called DBAN first. "Deriks Boot and Nuke". Easy to find in a google search. Takes 30sec to download and takes about 30mins to boot/erase the drive. The "nuke" word freaks people out, but there's nothing destructive about it. I've done this every time I've reformatted a drive (perhaps a hundred times now?) and been very pleased with the results.

[poynton]

Hi.

What size is the hard drive?
Use Win2000 or later for very large disks.


I have attached a zip file.
It contains a .exe file called MAXLLF.EXE.
This is a true low level format utility from MAXTOR.

It completely llf's the drive and remaps any visible bad sectors to the hidden table. (very useful if you are in the hard drive repair business!)

I obtained this utility from Maxtor when I was owner of a computer business. It will not work on all drives eg some Fujitsu (you don't use them, do you?) and some Seagate.

Warning. Once started, it is impossible to recover data. The disk is wiped.

To use, copy to a cd rom.
Boot the system using a system cd to the prompt.
Run maxllf from the cdrom. Follow the prompts.

After use, reboot with the system disk , FDISK then FORMAT, as usual.



Andy