drive won't format

[ockky]

okay, as of last week i lost a drive. The hard drive it self is an 80gb maxtor diamond plus. It has been partitioned into drives I - L. i turned on my computer last week and my J drive had vanished. hmm, okay that sucks for the games on that sucker i said to myself. and then, FVCK! my binds too! bah, oh well. so i tried to use file scanvger to save the files to no success. The files were very visible thru the program, but unable to be saved. (i can't recall the exact error message given) okay, screw it, i'll just format the drive i decide. So i try to format the drive thru disk manager, and i receive the error "the format did not complete successfully". i try this a handful of times, each time with the same result. so okay screw it, i'll just departition the whole farkin harddrive and reformat it, thinking that might help. (who needs all of these games on disk anyways?) so i departition and reformat and, once again, "the format did not complete successfully". sigh, shite.

hmp, so now i've tried fixboot, fixmbr, reinstalled xp pro, repartitioned both harddrives, and even tried some program called drive regenerator that searches for bad spots and will try to fix them (and after 8+ hours of searching, it found ZERO!)

lol, so i'm fairly certain my drive is still good, i just don't know what in the hell it is that i haven't done that can fix this sucker

i swear it's one thing after another for me

 

[CaptnKirk]

Just Do It !

 

[ockky]

forgot to mention that i tried everything on that powermax download and everything passed, and yet, the drive still won't format

 

[Fencer128]

Hi,

Sounds like you need SpinRite.

Have a read, but I think this is the tool for you.

Good luck,

Andy

 

[Fern]

Originally posted by: ockky
forgot to mention that i tried everything on that powermax download and everything passed, and yet, the drive still won't format

I think you might wanna try Maxblast 3 (not Powermax). Maxblast has zero-fill and partition utlities etc. See if can complete the task for you.

 

[MrChad]

Do you have your drive connected to a controller card?

 

[ockky]

okay, the drive really went crazy (and i mean WAY crazy) this past week, BUT i still think there may still be hope insight for me. (i can hope that anyways - obviously i'm crazy if i think that my drive is still saveable at this point)

so to update you guys, i have tried one of the max products (i'm not sure if it was power or blast, but i do know that it was the one that would format the drive - and i formatted the hell outta that sucka) . and i do not have a controller card. also, i haven't gotten around to using SpinRite yet because at some point the drive became so blitzed that i couldn't even get xp up or the recovery console.

so now, i've got xp pro with all of the updates and jazz on my 1st drive and am at least able to see the 2nd drive in partition magic 8 (it's marked as bad). i tried running a format on it thru it, but it posted some errors and failed. so my next idea is to try using 'diskpart' on it and seeing how that works out.

for some reason (one that has apsolutely no backing) i like to think that my problem is lying in the mbr, but i have no idea how i can go about wiping that sucker without using fdisk /mbr (which i can't use because of the crappy'ol ntfs formatting thru out that whole drive.

so what do you guys think of my plan? here it is summed up. . .
1. boot to the recovery console (plz god i can only hope it will work now since it wasn't working eariler)
2. run 'fixmbr' (i don't know why this would fix anything, but hey, i'm trying my best to be optimistic!)
3. run 'diskpart'
4. cross my fingers that my system will boot again

any of you guys got any better plans i'm up to hearing them. i've got a bad feeling that it's not gonna work and i'll be here to bitch about it tomorrow

ps. just so you guys know, if you hot plug a hard drive it makes a loud pop and will scare the hell outta you! (oh yea, and it'll make sure you have to do a nice cold boot afterward)

 

[ockky]

welp, fixmbr didn't seem to help, and diskpart wouldn't touch the drive, so i tried my maxtor disk again, and it just sat at (i think it was)

loading DS-SANDRA . . .

the computer just sat there over night, thinking, but it never could finish booting off the floppy.

i guess tonight i'll see what SpinRite can do for me . . .

 

[ockky]

finally! i don't know how, but somehow, i managed to finally get the friggin floppy to load with only the 'bad' drive in and was able to fdisk /mbr the sucker. and then i fdisked it again, and then i formated it and then i went into windows recovery console and deleted the partition, rebooted the system, and PRESTO! got my drive back!

it was a little weird thou that fdisk said i had some bad sectors, . . . CRAP! my format just failed in disk manager NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooo lol. damn

it got all the way to 100% too

guess i'll try out partition havoc and see what it tells me

looks like i'm about to invest in a couple of 10krpm drives . . .

 

[oldman420]

try using a linux partition manager on that drive.
just get disk one of any linix distro and use the format tool to repartition it as linux. then start xp setup and you should be able to repartition and format.
good luck
jerome

 

[ockky]

i'm unfamilar with linux about as much as i am with other dudes booties, so, er, not to sound lazy, butt, a link would be nice i'd really appreciate, seeing as how i am very limited on time, i only get about an hour a night to work on this sucker

man, i didn't mean to make that sound as gay as it was. . .oh no, what could this mean to meee nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

lol

okay

link plz

 

[oldman420]

http://www.linuxiso.org/download.php/565/Mandrakelinux10.0-Official-Download-CD1.i586.iso
this is for cd1 of mandrake you can change cd to 2 or 3 if needed i think cd1 gets you to the format function.
use this utility maybe if the drive is totaly forign to xp setup it will work better.
btw might want to play with linux if you need a chalange. make sure you burn this iso to cd using the SLOWEST burn speed or you will end up with coasters.