BIG HDD Problems. Please Help

[raulz88]

Ok, I've been running a dual boot with two seperate hard drives. One boots to XP, and the other boots to Redhat 9. I use whatever boot manager bundled with Redhat.

I decided that I never use the linux drive, so wanted to reclaim it for another partioion on the XP side of things. Well I reformatted the linux hard drive, and didn't even think about the boot manager. When I restarted my computer, it won't boot at all, and in fact will not even recognize my hard drive that has XP on it. It shows that there is a drive, but shows 0 space on it and no specs for it. I tried to reinstall windows, but it doesn't recognize the hard drive and then kicks me out of install. Did I screw up the master boot record? I don't really care if I lose the info on the disc, I just want to be able to use it again. Please advise. Thanks.

 

[Bobo]

Put the HD in another computer (if possible), see if it detects it, maybe reformat it

Check the boot options in the BIOS

 

[Praetor]

I decided that I never use the linux drive, so wanted to reclaim it for another partioion on the XP side of things. Well I reformatted the linux hard drive, and didn't even think about the boot manager. When I restarted my computer, it won't boot at all, and in fact will not even recognize my hard drive that has XP on it.

Get into BIOS and change the boot order to boot off the other hard drive

 

[Super_Nova]

get a windows 98 boot disk image from bootdisk.com and use it to create a windows 98 boot floppy if you don't already have a boot disk

Boot from the disk

with the windows xp drive in by itself type fdisk /mbr at the command prompt

Reboot

 

[raulz88]

OK here is an update on what is going on. The BIOS recognizes that there is a HDD present, but no specs or partitions. got a win98 boot disk and ran fdisk, but it cannot write to the disk with fdisk /mbr, and if I try to make a new partition using fdisk, I get a runtime error r6003, which is integer divide by 0. This really sucks. If you can think of anything else let me know. I tried to look at what the BIOS recognizes in the master IDE slot, and it is all zeroes as far as cylinders, sectors etc....

 

[Lorand]

Go to the hdd manufacturer's site and download some hdd tools (if any). You might need to do a low-level format.

 

[raulz88]

The manufacturer is Western Digital, going to search the site now. How do I do a low-level format? Thanks.

 

[raulz88]

OK ready for the exciting conclusion? Well, I tried everything I could possibly think of. Fdisk didn't work. I got the Western Digital HD Tools and tried to use that. It all ran fine, but still didn't do anything to the drive. My BIOS was telling me that something was plugged into to the IDE ribbon, but nobody was home. As a last resort I loked at the pins in the drive and lo and behold one of them is broken and pushed down into the body of the drive. I grab my torx set and retrieve the pin. The solder point is super small and close together with the other pins, so I push it through the slot and bend it a bit so that the end of the pin is touching the solder point firmly. I screw the thing back together, CAREFULLY put the ribbon back on, and reboot. A quick fdisk /mbr later, and everything is back up just fine and I didn't lose any data!

Thanks for all of your help. I wouldn't have figured out all the master boot record rewrite stuff o nmy own.

 

[Praetor]

Wow .. who woulda thought eh? Glad you got it settled there!

 

[Super_Nova]

Yes the /MBR command is an undocumented function of Fdisk. But neccesary if you want to blow away linux on a dual booting windows machine.