hard drive problems...wont format!?!?!?

[PYROMANIAC]

My friends hard drive decided to mess up one day and were still trying to fix it...right now i have his ide cable hooked to my uata133 pci card backing up info....i've tried to format the 5gig partition on his hd but it wont let me...it will get to 95% and then say "this format cannot be completed" if i do it in dos it will say "formatting...." and when it gets to 100% and you type "dir" and it shows all the info...it didnt even format...what could i do to just whipe the drive of everything that would actually work?

[John Jr]

What kind of drive is it? What is the ATA speed? Did you fdisk it?:confused:

[PYROMANIAC]

some kind of maxtor 40gig ata100.....hmm i might have overlooked fdisk...:beer: ill keep at it and see how it goes

[John Jr]

A utility that wipes out your fat table also would ensure your drive gets what it needs.

[PYROMANIAC]

where can i get such a utility?

[jajmon]

Are you using the 80pin cable or 40pin? You could use Maxtor's MaxBlast utility, to run tests and format.

[Xaotic]

THIS IS A VERY DANGEROUS SET OF FILES!

That being said, here is a kill disk utility. Copy these files to a 98 boot disk.

REMOVE ALL OTHER HARD DISK DRIVES PRIOR TO RUNNING THE UTILITY!!

It will remove all partition data on any drive attached to the system. When the system boots, run NOPAR.BAT and reboot. All of the partition data will be cleared. At that point, run FDISK and repartition and FORMAT.

It will not wipe the disk surface, for that a low level format is best(with the proper utility from the manufacturer) or a 3rd party disk wipe app.

[PYROMANIAC]

ill see what i can do and post results

[PYROMANIAC]

um yea....i ran that and then fdisked and removed all the stuff...but it just put it back on.....soooo how about those low level format utils?


edit: man this thing is so screwed...it will act like it has changed something but then when you reboot its just back again

[John Jr]

After you run the utility then fdisk, you have to format the drive and then you can either put on the os, or use as a second or third drive. I do not know of any program that could withstand a wipe out of the fat table then re partitioning of the drive without being removed. Are you sure you followed the directions correctly, I mean not to insult you in any way but I gotta ask the dumb stuff. If you did everything in the right order and followed the directions there must be a problem with the drive. try the max-blast software, assuming it is a maxtor drive, and look for errors with the drive. All else fails maybe it is still under warranty from the factory.

[Xaotic]

This one's not a LLF, but a general disk wipe.

http://www.killdisk.com/eraser.htm

Maxtor's LLF s in their MAXBLAST software, as mentioned before by jajamon, and located here. I'd go with this one and run the diagnostics first. It's located here:

http://www.maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm

Use Product Support > Utilities.