hard drive won't format!!

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by mcadam, Sep 25, 2004.

  1. mcadam

    mcadam Major Amnesia

    hi can any1 help with this one?

    got a friends 30gig h/d that's completely ruined (everything was corrupt due to a virus) and now when I begin setup from boot floppies etc I get to the formatting and it won't format. It says something about the drive being damaged and cannot be formatted. I've tried NTFS and NTFS quick and FAT won't work either! Any ideas, or has it completely had it?
     
  2. Rob M.

    Rob M. First Sergeant

    You might need to re-partition it first -- especially if the partition tables got messed with by whatever bit the system.

    Let us know what happens with the formatting after you've re-partitioned the drive.

    If the partitioning software won't work either, I'd begin to suspect a hardware problem of some kind.
     
  3. mcadam

    mcadam Major Amnesia

    Yeh it's totally had it, won't work no matter what I try. Re-paritioned it 6 times now and still won't format. I've used a new drive now, but thanks for your help anyway.
     
  4. Zulu-1

    Zulu-1 Specialist

    before you through it out could you give it to me??????????
    :p:p:p:p:p
     
  5. Wavetar

    Wavetar Sergeant

    Have you tried a low-level format? Most HD manufacturers offer low-level format utilities on their websites.
     
  6. mcadam

    mcadam Major Amnesia

    zulu you can have it free if you come over to herts, UK!!!!!!! :) yeah i've tried all formatting and it's just .....capiche!
     
  7. morlok

    morlok Private E-2

    I've been through this before.
    I had some drives go bad on me due to the cr*ppy pwer we have here in Norher NH. (Twin Mountain). They developed huge bad spots on tehem, all co-located on the drives. I posed the question about doing LLFs on the drives, both here and on other web sites. The news wasn't good.
    For modern IDE drives, tehre is no such thing as a LLF (low-level format) as there was in the good ole' days of MFM/RLL drives. The ctlrs no longer supports it. Apparently, the circuitry necessary to do the timing consumed about 40% of the ctlr.
    What passes for a LLF these days is a 'zero-fill' of the first few hundred MB of the disk (not even the entire disk).
    There are disk utilities out there that do zero-fills and general checks of the ctlr and attached drive.
    The ones I setteld on using are:
    Maxtor Maxpower
    It will work with other mfrs drives, but will complain and will fail them on some tests. Writing/reading any drive wasn't an issue.
    Salvation Scan Restoration
    I dont' remember much about this one, I used it, it worked.

    Note:
    Both require a bootable DOS disk. Maxpower makes its own (DR-DOS actually).

    Do a web search on LLF and Low-level format. I found a very long article explaining exactly how drives are formatted at eh factory, and why user LLF is a thing of the past.
     

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