How Can i format laptop hard drive..please help

imported_ritesh

Junior Member
Jun 13, 2004
9
0
0
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!!
 

ZYFER

Senior member
Nov 2, 2002
720
5
81
I would concur with Danny Boy, if you can't even get scandisk to run the surface scan, then there are issues with the drive, may want to look for a replacement
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
20
81
Usually, the "trying to recover allocation unit" error during format means that the drive's found some bad sectors. The drive sounds like more trouble than it's worth; I'll go with the consensus here that the drive is very close to death.