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Zero-ing a problem harddrive

watdahel

watdahel

Golden Member
I had two harddrives on one IDE cable. I used the slave drive as a backup for my porn collection. Anyway, my master drive is started to act up and I decided that I should install winXP on the other drive in the event that my main drive craps-out I can just switch drives and be back in business. Yesterday, I connected my backup drive as master on the IDE by itself and proceeded to install winXP. I didn't want a dual boot option that you would normally get when the installer sees another drive containing a winXP installation. I could just go to bios and select which drive to boot first.

The installer started copying the contents of the CD on the drive and restarts. This is where I reach a deadend. It tells me it's unable to load operating system. I repeated this five times, trying out different pin configuration on the drive, reseting the bios, switching IDE cables, install win2000, and sprinkling pixie dust all over. Each time it's the same retarded result. Everything works fine when I reinstalled on my main drive.

I reconnected both drives as before and the slave drive does contain a Windows folder that the installation copied over.

I don't know.
 
Have you scanned the drive you are using for viruses? If there is one that has messed with the MBR and you have not reformatted or repartitioned it, it is possible that that is what is preventing the install. I would recommend trying that first.

Let me know what happens....
 
I suspect a hardware problem if the installer is abruptly restarting like that. Possibly bad RAM or just a bad drive.
 
Thanks to my persistence I fixed my problem. Fortunately, Maxtor has a utility called PowerMax and it provides an option to do low-level formatting; that's converting every bit to zero in every sector.

I thought deleting the partition or doing a full format during the winXP installation does the same thing as a low-level format. I guess I was wrong. I probably tried installing the OS 15 times and I even went to recovery mode and used fixboot and fixmbr but to no avail.
 
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