Format

Christian Darrall

Christian Darrall

Active Member
Well, today my hard drive be came corrupted and came up with the message sayin "C:\ is not formatted" C:\=secondary blank drive, os is on D:

so when i format it, near the end of the format it says windows was unable to format the drive,

How do i fix this prob

BTW: im on windows 2000
 
OUCH! Hopefully you didn't the information off of the drive there. Do you have an old 98 startup floppy hanging around somewhere? By booting off of that having set the boot order in the bios to floppy you can type in the "fdisk /mbr" command once you are at the dos prompt and press enter. What this is supposed to do and does work at times is repair the master boot record that gives loading instructions to Windows. Give this a try even if you have to use the 2000 start floppy. The 98 floppy evens works with XP however.
 
That's not good! But I know the feeling lately when losing everything off of the first 250gb drive here due to a bios problem. The drive being slaved to a brand new one saw both failing to be recognised. First the new battery saw results until the memory timings even had to be reduced. But that is from a now failing chipset itself.

If the battery on your board is still good try clearing the cmos and try setting the second drive to the cable select jumper setting if not unplugging it temporarily. I've run dual drives here often and run into this a few times where a drive wasn't seen. You may even have to set both to the cable select position to run them together later. The master should be left at the master setting while trying both CS and SL setting for the second drive. I was about to make a few data dvds to backup some 180gb of data like video files, utilities, updates, etc. when it happened here. :( Give these a try to see if you get some good results though.
 
ok so heres the update,

I managed to get into the drive by booting into safe mode, the drive managment in administrative tools, and i formatted it from there, it worked,

i managed to format it, but i still hav the problem of redoing my coursework, due in TOMORROW!:mad: :mad: :(
 
Which means you formatted the wrong one the second time. Reinstall windows now, and then see if you can get the second one to work.
 
Even if your OS is not working on a HD, that doesn't mean all saved data is lost on that drive. I had a similar problem where I had a 30gb HD with an OS on it some files on it. Well the OS glitch and the drive would not load windows. I just inserted it into another computer as a slave and retrieved the saved files off of the drive, and then I reformatted the drive. Seeing how you have formatted one or both your drives it looks like the only option is to re-install your OS and pray for the best. As far as retrieving data it's more than likely gone, unless for some reason you did not format properly.
 
There's another option for data retrieval off of an unbootable drive when it becomes inaccessible even when slaved. The Live versions of Linux run strictly off of a cd that you boot from. The Knoppix or ubuntu Live distros are the easiest for Windows users to accustomed to. Without any OS being loaded from either the damaged? or simply unbootable drive or the destination drive a Live distro will readily access and copy what you need off of one drive to another even if the destination is slaved to a drive with a damaged partition. Knoppix Live for cd can read and copy files off of any drive despite the version of Windows on it as well. If you know with a Live distro onhand see it they can save your data before wiping everything.
 
Which seems like you are still having problems...
Click to expand...


to be honest, i didn't really know what happend. here my life story.

woke up, had a piece of toast, got onto the pc and started XP setup, i went through it all and then when asked selected my C:\ (but it was the 40gb with games and data on) so without knowing i formatted it, only to realise the os had moved back to D: and the data drive i had was now an empty c:

it sounds confusing but i understand it
 
In other words the boot order was somehow changed and you assumed the 40gb was the 20gb and proceeded to wipe it. Upon booting Windows did you see two listings for Windows installations or just one? When installing XP onto one drive with an existing installation even on another the boot.ini is modified to give you the choice of which partition/drive to boot. You selected the 40gb one.
 
If Windows was running on the other drive as well you could now set that as master on the cable and use the Disk Manager in Administrative Tools\Computer Management to create and format the 40gb now being set as the slave in order to use that as a storage drive. If Windows gets goofed on the 20gb at some time your data is still safe on the 40gb. Of you can choose to use the XP installer to create and format the drive as part of the installation process if you plan on an installation there. To avoid having a dual listing on booting up you would first disconnect the 20gb for the new install there.
 
When you install XP to one drive first on a two drive system where neither has an OS that drive becomes the boot drive when assigned in the bios itself. Later if you install XP again to the now second drive it will detect the first installation and configure the boot.ini file to include that installation if you leave the other connected for it to do just that.

The boot.ini can be edited after to prevent what you saw there with the option to load Windows from either drive with a dual listing on booting. You are simply multibooting one OS installed on two drives by choosing which installation to load Windows with. The edit out of the dual listing does prevent getting confused on which drive is actually C if you are new at it. Now you have to decide which drive will be strictly the boot drive, install Windows on it with the other unplugged until later, and then use that for storage.
 
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