Hard drive problems

[Starfire_MK2]

Ok, here's a wierd problem my friend is having. His motherboard will not recognize 1 of his 2 harddrives. They're both 30 gig maxtors. He thought this might be a virus problem, as he recieved a warning not too long ago, telling him not to boot from that drive, which he ignored :( So, after he checked all the hardware settings and cables, and still couldn't get it to boot on his system (it WOULD boot just fine on his Mom's Dell), he did a low level format, and tried again. After formatting, he went onto the bios, auto-detected the h/d, and cheked the settings against the info printed on the h/d itself. All was well. Then he re-booted, and got told "Boot Disk Fail". Going back into the bios, he discovered, that the system could not longer detect the h/d. He's tried this drive in every setting possible-no luck. The system DOES detect his secondary h/d. He's run the latest Maxtor utility on this drive, and it passes every test. Any ideas?:burn:

[]-[itman]

I'd say the thing's dead. All seem fine until you mentioned low-level formatting. Almost all of the time this WILL destroy a drive. It should be done at the factory level and at the factory level only. What it does is when you do high-level formatting you basically erase the disk and then arrange the hd into your file system(i.e. NTSF or FAT32). Low leveling however erases the disk but also attempts to organize the disk into it's cylinders, tracks, and clusters. Basically, in worst case scenerio, this can physically destroy the disk. They do this once and shouldn't be tried again. It'll still spin up and everything but mainly you can't read/write anything. Sorry bout the bad news=\

[Teacher_Doug]

Originally posted by Starfire_MK2
Ok, here's a wierd problem my friend is having. His motherboard will not recognize 1 of his 2 harddrives. They're both 30 gig maxtors. He thought this might be a virus problem, as he recieved a warning not too long ago, telling him not to boot from that drive, which he ignored :( So, after he checked all the hardware settings and cables, and still couldn't get it to boot on his system (it WOULD boot just fine on his Mom's Dell), he did a low level format, and tried again. After formatting, he went onto the bios, auto-detected the h/d, and cheked the settings against the info printed on the h/d itself. All was well. Then he re-booted, and got told "Boot Disk Fail". Going back into the bios, he discovered, that the system could not longer detect the h/d. He's tried this drive in every setting possible-no luck. The system DOES detect his secondary h/d. He's run the latest Maxtor utility on this drive, and it passes every test. Any ideas?:burn:

What exactly did he do to his disc to achieve a low-level format, because if he simply did an FDISK then that is NOT low level, and the problem is resolvable.
Remember, if you are getting "Boot Disk Fail", then it might simply mean one of the following.
1. There is no active partition on the disk
2. There is nothing in the active partition..
3. There is a bad sector in the boot area
4. Your disc is kaput

Best of Luck:beer: