Laptop HD diagnostic

[newbie_geek]

Heya,

This carcass of a laptop has landed on my desk, and i am having some issues with it. It has/had win 98 installed, but refused to boot like a good computer. So i figure it is best to do a slash and burn. So i start by pulling the HD out and putting it in an external craddle.

My primary machine refuses to recognize the drive.

So i take the sneaky approach of booting the laptop with Knoppix, and transfering all the files to a USB external HD. no problem.

But now that i am trying to format the laptops drive i am getting some eyebrow raising problems...

First off win98 install can seem to format the drive. Claiming some sort of "error"... fine...

So i try a win 98 boot floppy, and then i run format.com and it looks like it can only access a tiny 8MB portion of the drive?!?!?

Okay, back to knoppix, boot up and do a format through knoppix, and as it is looking for "bad sectors" the drive ends up looping at the 30% mark and knoppix cant get it to go further.

So here is the question:

1 - what kind of tool can i use to confirm that the drive is cooked?
2 - does it sound like the drive is cooked?

Thanks.

 

[The_Other_One]

Try repatitioning it, then format. If that doesn't still, try finding a low level format utility. This might be worth trying anyway if you suspect bad sectors. Sometimes that'll correct them.

That tiny 8M partition you see I suspect is unpartitioned or the formatted space you get after partitioning with 2000/XP.

 

[newbie_geek]

any suggested utilities for "low level formating"

 

[The_Other_One]

I know there used to be a little dos utility from Segate, but I don't know it's it's posted anymore.

 

[newbie_geek]

Excellent... using the secret password of "low level format" in google i have found

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/low-level-format.html

and am doing a proper thorough disk erase as we speak.

Thanks for the advice.