Different Drive Geometries?

[CTrainBEB]

I got a 40gig seagate from my friend recently and have it hooked up through a PCI IDE card. I got some of his data off of it and now I would like to reformat it and make it my own. It came from a compaq so the drive has two partitions, the system_sav partition and then everything else.

I started partition magic to work on it and I get an error that says the disk appears to have partitions created using a different drive geometry. It instructs me to delete partitions and create new ones. I try to do this but it will not work. Evyertime I try and format it it encounters an error and will not even begin the format. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[Boonesmi]

have you tried using an old win98 bootup disk and running fdisk? (to delete all partitions/file systems) then maybe it will let you format it

 

[Jiggz]

Your best bet is to "zero" the hdd first and then partition and format. You can download a "zero'ing" utility from seagate. Goodluck.