Can't Format my Hard Drive? What am I doing wrong?

Zapster

Banned
Mar 5, 2001
264
0
0
My brother purchased a Western Digital 1.2 Gig a few years ago. Being that he was putting it into an older computer, and the bios didn't support this big a hard drive, he choose the biggest drive the bios would support, which was about 650 megs. Now he gave the drive to me. I first tested the drive and it worked fine. I then FDISK'd the drive and it recongized the 1.2 Gig. The FDISK went through fine. I then tried to format the drive and after track 1, it came up with some sort of allecation error and stopped. I tried it many times, but could not get it to format. It's been a long time since I've done this. Am I missing something?
 

GregMal

Golden Member
Oct 14, 1999
1,427
0
71
That old of a WD HD may have had "Ontrack" BIOS software installed
in the boot sector. You may have to use Ontrack to first remove the
boot sector software. Then you can fdisk/format correctly....
Greg
 

Zapster

Banned
Mar 5, 2001
264
0
0
I thought the same thing. I went and dug out the ONTRACK disk that came with the drive. Really counldn't believe I could find it, but I did. I even tried to use the ONTRACK Disk Manager to reformat, delete, etc. Anything! After a few tracks it stopped and gave an error to format manually. Are there any other format programs around? Perhaps something that will skip over a bad track or two?
 

GregMal

Golden Member
Oct 14, 1999
1,427
0
71
Goto WD's web site and download the lastest diagnostic utility.
It'll create a DOS boot disk with the util.
Let the util scan and flag the harddrive.
Then attempt to fdisk/format........
Greg