I have an Seagate 300g HD for some extra storage. It has some bad sectors now and wont work. Windows wont let me reformat it and every time i use the seagate software that came with it, it says it was a success but i try to access it and it asks me if i want to format it. I have all the data already backed up so loosing that is no big deal to me, i just want to get this thing working. Can anybody help?
Erase my Hard Drive
- Thread starter SidEvil
- Start date
The_Other_One
VIP Member
Any low-level-format utility might fix it... Killdisk is one I've heard of but not tested just yet. Just realize there is no guarantee this will solve the problem...
GParted might be the option there for simply deleting the current partition. The Linux tool detects hardware better then other utilities other then that provided by Seagate. You can also use that to create a new single or multiple NTFS partitions from the 0.3.3.0 live for cd-r version found at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828
The screen shots for that can be seen on the home page at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
Active Killdisk more or less repeatedly write binary zeros to a drive while still running far faster then the old dos based zero fill utilities that take forever it seems! Once you do clean the drive use a good drive diagnostic tool to examine the drive to see if it will need replacement at some point. Otherwise the partitioning tool selected should be able to work around any bad sectors found.
The screen shots for that can be seen on the home page at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
Active Killdisk more or less repeatedly write binary zeros to a drive while still running far faster then the old dos based zero fill utilities that take forever it seems! Once you do clean the drive use a good drive diagnostic tool to examine the drive to see if it will need replacement at some point. Otherwise the partitioning tool selected should be able to work around any bad sectors found.
I ran the Killdisk yesterday and it took about a day to complete. After i looked at the "view data" and there was still data on there. So i tried running it again today and it said it was going to take 13000+ hours to complete. As far as GParted everytime i download it, it keeps asking me if i want to open it, then i do, and it gos back to the same window.
First of all with the GParted version there you simply download the 35mb iso image to a folder. Once that is done you will need a program that can burn that direct to a bootable cd-r to see that work. A free version of BurnOn works wonders for burning the image onto cd-rs and can be found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/
The first thing to know about the Linux tool is how it boots once you have it burned onto disk. If your board has an F8 boot device option like seen on Asus boards you press the F8 key at post time instead of the DEL to enter the bios setup. That will bring up a screen where you simply choose between floppy, hard drive, or optical for a one time boot from that device. That saves repeat trips into the bios for this.
As it loads you simply press the enter/return key at each prompt leaving settings alone there. When you see 24 or 32bit simply leave it at 24 and proceed to the next whcih shows 1024x768 or 1280x1024 for screen resolutions. Unless you have a large 20" display tthe 1280x1024 moves things off screen. The default 1024x768 works best. Then you finally reach the main gui you will see the first drive listed as HDa1 NTFS and so forth on the immediate screen there. Simply go to the far right on the menu bar and note the small button. That will have a dropdown list of all hard drives installed.
With that being the second drive installed you would see that as HDb1. There you simply highlight anything found there and proceed upto the menu bar to find the delete button. That will delete the partition you select. One you click apply a confirmation prompt comes up for a yes or no answer from you. To exit later a small red button at the bottom right will offer reboot or reboot and eject disk. First watch the process go to work after answering the confirmation prompt. The best advice is to try a dry run first to get familier with how it works and avoid wiping the wrong drive by mistake!
The first thing to know about the Linux tool is how it boots once you have it burned onto disk. If your board has an F8 boot device option like seen on Asus boards you press the F8 key at post time instead of the DEL to enter the bios setup. That will bring up a screen where you simply choose between floppy, hard drive, or optical for a one time boot from that device. That saves repeat trips into the bios for this.
As it loads you simply press the enter/return key at each prompt leaving settings alone there. When you see 24 or 32bit simply leave it at 24 and proceed to the next whcih shows 1024x768 or 1280x1024 for screen resolutions. Unless you have a large 20" display tthe 1280x1024 moves things off screen. The default 1024x768 works best. Then you finally reach the main gui you will see the first drive listed as HDa1 NTFS and so forth on the immediate screen there. Simply go to the far right on the menu bar and note the small button. That will have a dropdown list of all hard drives installed.
With that being the second drive installed you would see that as HDb1. There you simply highlight anything found there and proceed upto the menu bar to find the delete button. That will delete the partition you select. One you click apply a confirmation prompt comes up for a yes or no answer from you. To exit later a small red button at the bottom right will offer reboot or reboot and eject disk. First watch the process go to work after answering the confirmation prompt. The best advice is to try a dry run first to get familier with how it works and avoid wiping the wrong drive by mistake!
That's the easy part there! You simply choose the optical drive under cd/dvd drives that the GParted cd is in. Instead of seeing Windows load as usual the Linux will then load up since you selected the optical drive and not the default boot device set in the bios itself. This is a one time only method for the quick boot of GParted.
One thing you can keep in mind about the Asus feature there is that you can dual boot 2 completely separate OSs totally independent of each other without ever going into the bios itself to change the boot order there!
One thing you can keep in mind about the Asus feature there is that you can dual boot 2 completely separate OSs totally independent of each other without ever going into the bios itself to change the boot order there!