Is my hard drive a goner?

[bishbrand]

Hi, I've been trying to get my hard drive formatted after it wouldn't get past the EZ-Bios black screen. I don't know how that happened exactly, but I was running XP Pro and one day it just wouldn't go, no hard drive sounds or anything. Anyway, my hard drive was partitioned so I ran partition magic and tried to merge the partitions and format. It sort of worked and I could get to command prompt after I ran MaxBlast, but when I was trying to install Win 98 it said that the format was not correct and setup needed to format again. I said ok, and afterwards it said setup could not continue due to errors during format process. I took my hard drive out and went to my other computer and was going to format it using that one, but the system wouldn't boot up properly and couldn't get out of the startup screen. I tried moving it back to the old computer and now it only detects the hard drive after like a minute or if I put it in primary slave, and it still can't get out of the startup screen. Is there anything I can do to fix it, or am I going to have to get a new hard drive? Thanks.

 

[SemperFi]

Did you use your max blast software to do a diagnosis on the drive to check for errors?

Semper Fi

 

[bishbrand]

Yeah, it checked said no errors, then I did the format from there. The strange thing is that after windows setup formatted it, the drive size was incorrect at the dos prompt.

 

[SemperFi]

How old is your board? does your bios recognize the correct size drive? Did you use that ezbios part of the maxblast software?

Also what is the drive size and the formated size reported by dos? What I am getting at is there can be a sizeable difference. For example you have a 60 Gig drive and after formating dos says it is only 56Gig drive. That is just about right.

 

[amdskip]

What everyone has said so far is right on target. Another suggestion I have is to try to use a windows 98 bootdisk (floppy) and boot and format the drive from dos. You may have to run FDISK at the promt to check out the partitions and possibly delete all the partitions. Then recreate the partitions, reboot the system, and then format c: and the promt

 

[AWEstun]

The jumpers on the back of the drive itself are wrong.

Shelby

 

[bishbrand]

The jumpers are ok cuz that's how it was before and i've tried to change them a few times in an attempt to fix it. I've noticed that if I put it in slave then it gets detected and it responds much quicker. It's been going really slow when it's being detected in primary master and when it's booting from floppy. MaxBlast is now saying that there is an error reading sector 0 or sector 1. Also when I plug the hard drive of the computer I am using now into that computer, it doesn't get past the bios screen, so it looks like it might not just be the hard drive that is messed up.

PS: I can't format from dos cuz it loads ramdrive or if i don't let it load ramdrive then it doesn't detect the hard drive.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Have you swap IDE cables to rule out the cable being bad? If so you may have a bad IDE controller on your board, have you tried attatching it to the 2nd controller to see if the same symptoms result?