Seriously Screwed Up Hard Drive- Need Help

Cyos

Cyos

New Member
I managed to get my hands on a rather old 80 GB IDE HDD. I put it in to an old windows XP computer, it worked fine, the usual. I tried to format it, but forgot to check "Quick Format". I got tired of waiting for a normal format, and tried to cancel, but it gave me an error, and I had to Ctrl-Alt-Del out of the reformatting process.

So I'm left with a semi-formatted hard drive. I boot up Ubuntu, but it can't format the drive - it gives me an error to tell me it failed. I made a CD of PartLogic 0.69, but it wouldn't boot, citing a few DMA errors. I tried another partitioning software (Cute Partitioner or some such), but it wouldn't boot at all. I put in the Windows CD to see if it could install on the borked drive, but it gave the excuse that "Setup couldn't access the device".

What is utterly bizarre is that Windows XP, and the mobo's bios know the device is there. They happily report that my 82 GB Maxtor Hard Drive contains no volumes, but is otherwise working properly. Yet when I go to My Computer, the drive is simply not there. Is there any way to force Windows into seeing the drive so we can finish formatting it? It sees the drive, and so does the bios, and so does the Ubuntu installer, but none of them seem able to actually do anything to the drive.

All help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
 
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have you tried right clicking on my computer, choose manage, choose disk management, and see that borked partition/drive in question? perhaps(?) you have to assign a drive letter
 
dznutz said:
have you tried right clicking on my computer, choose manage, choose disk management, and see that borked partition/drive in question? perhaps(?) you have to assign a drive letter
Click to expand...

The new drive doesn't even show up under Disk Management, only the old, still working one.

paratwa said:
Now you see the wisdom of never stopping in the middle of a format, or a defrag.

You might have to download a file from WD that will format it for you.

Go here and download the lifeguard tools for the HD you are using. You need to load it on a floppy to run it.
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1
Click to expand...

Will a USB drive work? Neither of my currently working PCs have floppy drives, and even then, I'm not sure if I even have a floppy disk to use. I guess things couldn't get much worse by trying.

Also... if interrupting a format or defrag can mess things up this bad, why don't they put a warning? The only message I ever got when trying to exit was that "The format could not be interrupted". Couldn't they at least warn me that using another method to try and interrupt it would pretty much kill it?

Lesson learned I guess. I'll see what I can do about a floppy drive.
 
Just boot back to your XP cd and delete the partition and start over. After you delete it just boot up windows and use Disk Management to partition it and format.
 
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StrangleHold said:
Just boot back to your XP cd and delete the partition and start over. After you delete it just boot up windows and use Disk Management to partition it and format.
Click to expand...

Windows XP setup (from the boot CD) sees the device, but cannot access it. It simply says "Setup cannot access this device".

I tried that WD software indicated above. Installed it both to my hard drive, and to my USB key. In both instances, the software would not run, even after a restart complaining that it was already running, even though it wasn't, at least not to the extent that I could see. I've got an old floppy drive- I'll try that.



Update: Not sure what kind of floppy drive you were talking about, but the installation barely gets to 25% before it has to stop because there is not enough space. And even if there was, I wouldn't know what to do, I didn't see a readme. Any other ideas? I've tried putting the drive in an external enclosure, but the same problem occurs.
 
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have you tried this boot cd?
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

i've only used it to hack passworded systems but it has a bunch of formatters at the boot level. check it out.

and.............. worse case scenario would be taking a magnet and rubbing it all over the drive then try to reformat it. never done this before but in my twisted mind it may work.... worth a try.
 
Well, I've managed to somewhat solve my problem. For those curious, I used an IDE to SATA connector, and booted with the software dznutz suggested. It was able to format it, but for some reason, only 52.6 GB are available. Doesn't really matter, though, it's enough for me do dual-boot Ubuntu so I can play around with it. Thanks for all the help, and lesson learned: even if it doesn't say something bad will happen, it will anyway. ;-)
 
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