Cant format hard drive...Please Help

[imported_ritesh]

I have a laptop - HP OmniBook 4150 with a 1G IBM hard drive.
Short Story:
I cant format hard drive from MS DOS, when i try to i get message:
" Trying to recover allocation unit 2155 and increments in number and goes in loop.

I have tried delpart and when saving after deletion of partition it gives message "error writing to partition table" and when i try FDISK to create new partition after deleting existing one it gives "checking drive integrity" and hangs so i cant format drive.

Long Story: I had Win98 on this laptop and all of a sudden it came up upon booting "corrupted himem.sys. So i tried formatting from DOS and it went ok first time and then when i ran Win 98 setup from CD it came with message, cannot update hard disk. Running scandisk for C: gives tick for all sections but when goes to do surface scan gives "Run Time Error: R6003" and hangs.

Now i can access C drive ok from DOS. Of course theres nothing on it currently. Even when trying to create a directory from DOS it gives message"your program caused a divide overflow error"

Has any bod got any ides. Is this hard drive gone kaput or some virus etc...i have tried so many forums/hp site but no luck. Any Geniuses out there..please help!!

 

[ericboo]

How about booting to a DOS disk and running FDISK, deleting the partition, creating a partition and then formatting.

 

[Greg04]

Ditto, a good old FDISK should do the trick

 

[PCHPlayer]

Find out what brand of HD you have then download their disk check utility. At least you can eliminate the drive itself. I just lost a 20GB IBM Travelstar and the Hitachi test utility was kind enough to tell me it was bad.

 

[roguerower]

FDISK it all the way. Delete the existing partition, make a new primary partition. That'll tell you if the drive's still good. And then format that junks.