Can install Windows 98 but not Windows 2000 or Windows XP on hard drive...

[ddeder]

I formatted a Seagate 10GB hard drive with a single partition using FAT32 and ran scandisk. The surface scan detected one bad sector and marked it so that it would not be used in the future. I then removed the partition and booted from the Windows 2000 CD. About halfway through the format (using NTFS), I got a blue screen error saying something like Driver_cannot_be_unloaded... I removed the partition and tried again with the same result. I then removed the partition and tried to install Windows XP. I received a blue screen error during the format but with a slightly different message. Something about the partition being damaged and not being able to install to that partition. Finally, I removed the partition again, recreated it and formatted it using FAT32 and then installed Windows 98 SE without a problem.

Can someone tell me, is the bad sector causing a problem with the install of Windows 2000/XP? I wonder because it was detected and patched using a utility from a Windows 98 startup disk. Any thoughts?

 

[Codewiz]

Try this:

Use fdisk to create a partition and format it with FAT32. Tell Win2k or WinXP to leave the system intack so it makes no changes to it. That way it should just immediately start copying files over to it. After you have win2k or winxp install you could convert it to NTFS.

 

[DaiShan]

I'm not sure, but when you removed the previous partition you may have un-did the marking of that sector as bad, causing the win 2k format to try to use that sector. In any case first I would recommend getting another drive, or RMA'ing this one, physical defects such as bad sectors often point to a failing drive, you might get a couple of months use out of it then it dies, to me it just isn't worth the trouble... If you don't want to do that you might try marking the bad sector again before trying to format in 2k.

 

[ddeder]

Thanks for the replies. Looks like removing the partitions did "unmark" the bad sector. I had to run scandisk again to redetect it and then I installed Windows 2000 leaving the file system as FAT32. This works properly. Funny, you can format a hard drive using FAT32 even if there is a bad sector but you cannot format with NTFS... In any case, I don't want to use a hard drive with a bad sector as my primary hard drive so I am installing the OS to a new 20GB hard drive.

Next question....

If I use NTFS on the 20GB hard drive, can I slave the old hard drive off of that and format it using FAT32?

 

[networkman]

Sure can.

 

[dude]

Originally posted by: ddeder
Thanks for the replies. Looks like removing the partitions did "unmark" the bad sector. I had to run scandisk again to redetect it and then I installed Windows 2000 leaving the file system as FAT32. This works properly. Funny, you can format a hard drive using FAT32 even if there is a bad sector but you cannot format with NTFS... In any case, I don't want to use a hard drive with a bad sector as my primary hard drive so I am installing the OS to a new 20GB hard drive.

One bad sector? That's perfectly fine. Drives will countinually develope bad sectors as you use them. It's natural. But if everytime you do a surface scan and it keeps comming up with NEW bad sectors, then you must RMA the drive as it's definately failing.