HDD emergency!!!

[Novdid]

I need a trustworthy tool that zeroes the first few sectorson the drive.

My friend managed to seriously **** up his HDD when he strangely tried to run w98 fdisk when he wanted to install w2k. Don't ask me how, just give a link to a good tool to put on a bootable floppy!

[Helevitia]

boot off a bootdisk and type

fdisk /mbr

may work...

Dave

[Technoid]

Originally posted by cking4@ford.com
(I
distinctly remember Technoid stating that I was making absolutely no sense by suggesting it in the
first place )

Yup, and as I said last round:

There is absolutely no way to make a HDD go physicaly broke by using "normal" software like Fdisk, Ghost, etc etc....

It might be posible if you got one of theose old motheroards with Low format option in bios but as it is for LRF drives I seriously doubt it!

For an eazy fix:
Ranish Partition Manager

Best ever

Makes it easy to get rid of whatever strange partition or formating

[ayoub_ibrahim]

for ibm hdds get DFT from here

[Novdid]

That was what I was looking for ayoub, but I'm not shure it works on non IBM disks.

cking, your problem is exactly the same as mine. I have been in the same situation before with my own drive, and luckily that was an IBM and I solved the issue with the DFT utility.

[seether]

if DFT doesnt do it for you, either google or go to the support section of gateway.com

look up and download the most recent ver of GWSCAN.exe - it's a small diagnostics and zero filling prog made by western digital - when i was there we used it on IBMs, Seagate U series, maxtors, and WDs - both ide and scsi - if the drive is a barracuda, download disk manager for diag and zero fill from seagate - (gwscan hosed 2 of my barracudas a couple of years ago)

[Kurt]

Originally posted by cking4@ford.com
Technoid:

Note that here, as well as last time, I was not trying to assert that FDISK et al were capable of damaging
an HD. What I was trying to suggest was that there appears to be something mean and terrible lurking when
you place a active boot partition a clean HD using DOS/W9x FDISK, *and then* do an NTFS image restoration
(or perhaps even a clean 2K installation, as Novdid seems to be suggesting here) onto said partition, *as opposed
to* using the 2000/XP CD-ROM or boot floppy setup and HD format/partition routines from the getgo.

Here's someone else who ran into the same, or at least a similar, problem that I did...

What I ended up doing with the 3rd Maxtor was to set the boot partition up using 2000's setup, setting
it to a size that I knew would be approximately equal to the backed up image that I really wanted to
install (so that I would not have to build by workstation load completely from scratch all over again) -- and
once I completed the installation of 2000 properly from the CD, I then restored the same image that I
attempted to previously. That drive has now been running for several months now, without a single
problem. I still have a hard time believing it was coincidental.

One thing that might have created or aggravated my problem was that I am still working from an older
version of DriveImage; 4.01, which reboots out to DR (Digital Research) DOS for all of its operations. I plan
to update this to v5 or v6 soon -- the newer versions do not have to log out of Windows to work.

I do appreciate the link to Ranish, though -- thanks much for posting that...

you can replace dr-dos by any other dos you like. you might have compatibility problems with large drives both with driveimage and you mobo's bios. dunno what size the hds are, but there's a limit at 30gb and another at 80gb (file system might not be able to boot from a partition too big).then there's the cables you should check. if 3 drives from different manufacturers fail after 30days, the problem is likely somewhere else...(psu, cables, mobo...)


moreover, why go to the trouble of using fdisk before driveimage? just use driveimage, you can do what fdisk does...