Help wih formatting a hard drive in Xp

[RonRPh]

Have a computer with 5 hard drives running- 2 thru primary ide channels and 3 thru a promise card. Everything was fine for months. Hard drive 1 was backed up to hard drive 2 using drive wizard. Drive wizard then started to complain a device had been moved. Drive 1 has partition c;e;f;g;h;i;j;K. Drive 2 was (is) d; and L: thru R:. When I looked at the d drive it was unformatted and there was extra 16 mb of unalloccated space on Drive 2; I figured I could just reformat- used xp's interface to reformat- returned an error. Next thought was to use another utility- tried western digitals EZ-drive- again appeared to format it but xp says the format is raw. Decided to try Partition Magic 8- again it refuses to format the disk. Have not tried fdisk as I am not familiar with this utility at all- does anybody know if it would make a diffrerence- I would think EZ-drive would be a low format utility also- and believe I use it before. I am running out of ideas to try. Any other ideas would be appreciated- miss backing up my computer.

 

[Pariah]

Are you sure the drive isn't just dead? Check for viruses as well. If none of those methods worked it's likely something wrong with the actual drive.

 

[Jolyon33]

Yeah, sounds like a dead drive to me if you cannot reformat it.

 

[KF]

Try redoing your cables, or a new cable. Try the drive by itself, without another drive on the cable. Set the clock to normal if you are overclocking.

Go to your HD manufacturer's site and get a diagnostic utility, and a low level format utility which can remap bad sectors so they appear not to exist. The utilities will probably operate from DOS or will boot their own DOS-like OS. A diagnostic utility does not need the disk to be formated in order to test it.


FDISK simply rewrites the partition information. If the sectors where this info is put are bad, then it can't. FDISK comes with Win9x, not XP. The corresponding utility in XP is DISKPART.