Problems formatting a Laptop Hard Drive..

[ripthesystem]

My friend recently bought a used laptop off of ebay so he could run around and do word processing and everything else you would do with an old portable and he was going to install Win2k on it.

Before he got a chance to do that- his wife installed a trial version of XP and made the HD NTFS. Neither one of them like XP and they want to switch but can't get 2k to install and they're not entirely sure why. (they are n00bs supreme)

Anyways FDISK won't recognize the drive (NTFS prob?) and apparently somewhere along the way the boot sector got screwed up too and what these people really need is a low-level format.

As it turns out the HDD is a IBM Travelstar and their IBM disk utility which I've used on several Deathstars won't work on the Travelstar...

Any hints on my best bet for a low-level format for this drive?
The Notebook is an older compaq armada..

Thanks!
ripthesystem

 

[Mingon]

By a laptop harddrive to desktop connector off eb@y and just use a win98/me start disk and then fdisk it.

 

[ripthesystem]

Ohhh Kay.
Not that that wouldn't work but surely there is another way.. And if that's the case- why can't you just use the 98 startup disk on the notebook itself?

thx
rip

 

[KillerCow]

Got to http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm and download ZAP and WIPE. Put them on a boot disk and run ZAP to zero-fill the Master Boot Record and the Boot Record of the first partition and then reboot and try the 2k OS install. That should fix you problem (assuming that it is a software issue). Try WIPE to zero-fill the first 8 gigs if ZAP doesn't work. You wont be able to recover any data from the drive after running WIPE.

Also, take a look at http://www-1.ibm.com/support/manager.wss?rs=0&rt=0&org=hdd&doc=F62ADA3B477744C786256878006A6390, but I dont think that it will be of much help if you can't get an OS installed.

 

[ripthesystem]

killer Cow

thanks for the help- looks like I didn't scroll far enough down on the IBM page

rip