Help! System will not boot

[spoogenet]

I tried Normal and Large modes. Each would let me create a primary partition, however the creation of an extended partition messed everything up.

I'm back to LBA now, I would expect that the drive should be using LBA mode anyways.

I still can't create a partition on the drive.

New question: Should I upgrade the disk and write the signature on it, etc? When I enter Disk Manager it prompts me, so far I've just been cancelling it, but should I do that? Could it be part of my problem?

b

[Wombat]

I don't think they changed this with Win2K. After you partition a drive, you MUST reboot before you try to format it. It sounds like you might not have done that.

[spoogenet]

When I create partitions it just asks me if I want to go ahead and format it. I think I've done it before, but I'm not sure.

The last number of times I tried to do it I would just create the partition without formatting it. I can't even create a primary partition when the drive is in LBA mode. It just creates a partition for the entire drive.

In Normal and Large modes I could create primary partitions, but when trying to create an extended partition it would mess everything up. I did not reboot between creating primary and extended partitions.

b

[spoogenet]

After successfully creating (and not formatting) a primary partition on the drive (LBA mode), I decided to reboot before creating an extended partition.

After rebooting, I tried to create the extended partition and, once again, I get the "Server threw an exception" error......back to square one.

I'm starting to think this free drive is a waste of time.....

b

[cbman]

If you are going to get rid of it you could send it to me... I have a Win2K machine that I could waste time on with it as well...

A serious question.. have you checked the integrity of the drive itself by doing a surface scan... I had a customers machine that had the same problem and it turned out that there were bad sectors at the start of the disk.

As well I know someone who had problems with a drive (Couldn't FDISK or Partition it at all...) and it took flashing the bios to a different revision to fix it.

(The original bios revision worked fine for the half month that the machine was on demo... I am still not entirely sure what happened to screw it up, just that it took 3 hours of playing around and pulling whats left of my thining hair out before the flash and that is what fixed it.

[Wombat]

Are you doing low-level formatting? It takes a lot longer, but if you've got bad blocks in there, it's a must.

[spoogenet]

I have not done a surface scan of the drive. Does the built-in Win2k Checkdisk utility do a surface scan? I never really did figure out exactly what it does....

I do not have a utility that will do a low-level format, or at least I am not aware that I have such a thing, thus I will say that I have not been doing a low-level format. I am only using the built-in Win2k tools since I have nothing else to work with.

I will probably take the drive back to its original owner and see if it still works in his machine. With any luck I haven't screwed up the drive anymore than it may be on its own.

If it works in his, and not mine, then I will definitely blame the BIOS or the IDE controller. I will first try the secondary controller on mine, maybe I should try a new cable as well. My guess is that if one of the lines on the cable is messed up, then it is possible for it to work and not work simultaneously?

b

[rubank]

spoogenet,

I may be a little late in answering and I don´t know if you´ve tried this, but i suggest you download Seagates free diagnostic tool.

You´ll find it here

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/B7a.html

rubank