Something wrong with my WD800 80gb hard drive

[tfcmasta97]

Hey, I know for maxtor they have some really good tools that help repair errors on them (Powermax)

Are there any tools like that for WD?

 

[digory]

what is it doing specificly?

 

[johnjkr1]

Yes, all hard drive manufacturers offer diagnostic tools for their drivers. I believe Wester Digitals are called data lifeguard.

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

But their usefullness really depends on your issue.

 

[tfcmasta97]

The hard drive is detected in my BIOS and in 'My Computer' it comes up as F:\ but I cant format it... I've been trying to get it to work with Partition Magic.

 

[huesmann]

Have you set up any partitions on it? Gotta do that before formatting it.

 

[tfcmasta97]

yeap, i have a partition the size of the HD

 

[tfcmasta97]

any ideas?

 

[TD77077]

Depending on the OS you are using, you might have to assign the partition as active.

 

[tfcmasta97]

I'm on XP Pro.

 

[TD77077]

I saw a comment on another thread that XP Pro won't let you format as FAT32. If that's what you are trying to do, you need to do it some other way, amybe using the software from the HD manufacturer. Otherwise, it sounds like you should be able to format from within XP.

 

[huesmann]

Does XP let you convert FAT32 drives to NTFS? Perhaps you could use a Win98 boot disk to format it to FAT32 and then let XP convert it? Or just use it as FAT32?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: huesmann
Does XP let you convert FAT32 drives to NTFS? Perhaps you could use a Win98 boot disk to format it to FAT32 and then let XP convert it? Or just use it as FAT32?

Yes, you need to use a Win98se boot disk to format partitions larger than 32GiB as FAT32, W2K and XP's FORMAT utility won't let you.

I do suggest to the OP to download WD's "Data Lifeguard" diagnostics tool, onto a bootable floppy, and run a full surface scan. That will indicate whether or not the drive is actually faulty somehow. I suspect not, if the user was trying to format it all as FAT32 under XP, but better to be safe than sorry. Might also want to make sure that your data is backed up, just in case.