On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:18:29 -0800, "Eric Gisin"
wrote:

:It is NOT a hardware problem. It is NTFS corruption.
:You didn't enable Win 2K large (137GB) drive support in the registry,
:and NTFS wrote past 137G which wiped the MBR and boot sector.

I have another HD in the box that's 200 GB and it has one logical drive
only, and is formatted NTFS. That's obviously not the problem. Also, the
drive was working fine for 1.5 years and I made no changes. The logical
drives simply disappeared from it, evidently data corruption. I don't
know what kind of corruption it is, but it evidently is preventing the
drive from being properly reformatted -- see the post I made in this
thread 5-10 minutes ago.

Dan


:"Dan_Musicant" wrote in message
.. .
: Part number: ST3160023A-RK
:
: Bought 08/13/2004 online at outpost.com, and it still has almost 4 years
: on the warranty. I've never lost a HD before, although I RMA'd one that
: was getting bad sectors 6 months after purchase. I've had over 10 HDD's.
: This was working perfectly, AFAIK and suddenly a couple of days ago
: Windows 2000 doesn't see the drive (Explorer). Disk Management shows it
: online but unformatted. So, I suppose the partition table became
: corrupted. Is this an automatic RMA? Can it be assumed that it's a
: hardware issue? Is it possible for me to retrieve the data somehow? Or
: is that an expensive and/or iffy proposition? Of the 3 HDD's in the
: system, this was the most expendable in terms of the data. In that I was
: extremely lucky. I used it mainly for backup and temporary work.
:
: Thanks for any info.
:
: Dan
: