Broken hard-drive?

psycocommy

Junior Member
Jul 29, 2003
22
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0
So I bought a USB 2.0 enclosure for an old HD from a system I don't use anymore, installed the drive, connected it to my current PC and it was working fine. The drive was partitioned however, so rather than just deleting everything, I tried using Computer Management under Admin Tools in Win XP to delete the partitions and format the drive into NTFS. I got an error saying that the format failed and I have not been able to do anythign with it since; chkdsk will not run on it, I guess because it is not formatted into anything, and any attempts to format, through Windows or 3rd party utilities, all fail. Any ideas why and how I could fix this or is it basically junk now?
 

stevty2889

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2003
7,036
8
81
Have you tried taking the drive out of the enclousure, and putting it inside your PC to try and format it?
 

DennyD

Senior member
Oct 29, 2004
224
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Yep... that's the best way to know if the drive is toast or not. Put it into a desktop and try to format it. If that's a no-go, try to FDISK it. Something else you could do when the drive is in the PC is boot from the XP cd and in the Recovery Console type "chkdsk /r" (without the "")

It may take a while, especially if it is a large drive or if there's a number of problems. Just my 2 cents :)
 

ZYFER

Senior member
Nov 2, 2002
720
5
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Yup, concur with them, its the best way to determine which one it is, the Enclosure or the drive.
 

psycocommy

Junior Member
Jul 29, 2003
22
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Yeah, that would have been my first move, but unfortunately I am on a laptop (I know I said PC, sorry). I guess I'll try to find someone who can let me use their computer for this, since the old one I took the HD out of is fried. Thanks.