resuscitating hard drive which wont format FAT

Listen, guys I really am grateful to you for your assistance even if it was
to the effect that the drive is sick and / or dying.

However I have one last question:

This is obviously only an experimental drive with nothing in particular on
it. After seeing all your diagnoses I gave up on installing XP on it as it
wont actually boot or go through the second boot during the install process.

However I then put it in the computer as a slave and it SEEMS to work
perfectly as a slave in Windows XP?? I haven't tried running any utilities
on it as I did the upgrade from Me to XP and my Systemworks in still
configured for Me and wont do much in an XP system. As I have Systemworks
2001 which was designed for Windows 2000 installed and working in a Windows
2000 system, I am a bit reluctant to believe the Norton propaganda about it
being catastrophically disastrous for use with XP since XP IS an NT OS and
is only an incremental advance (if that is the proper word for a system
which constantly nags you about all sorts of things such as to activate it
and tell Microsoft that you are renting a system from them) over 2000 and
uses all the sale technology and am considering uninstalling and
re-installing systemworks 2001 in this computer to see what happens when I
try to run Norton Disc Doctor which (I think???) is one of the utilities
which still works in NT and with a NTFS drive.

Now that I have got this sick drive working (and, again, don't need to get
anything off it) are there any utilities which I can run on it at all?

L2Q

"Folkert Rienstra" wrote in message
...

In , Licensed to Quill
wrote:
I may have neglected to mention, there is another drive in the system
which
reads perfectly well.

I suppose this means that the drive is dying?

Likely, if the error was introduced through the aftermath of a headcrash.
This will then probably get worse and worse.
Could also be that the drive just wrote rubbish to the identify sector by
whatever glitch imaginable in which case the situation is probably stable.
In either case you don't want to use it. One result could be that bios and
drivers will only work it in the lowest PIO mode.

Are there no utilities which can resuscitate it?

If WD's don't, then no. There is no way to write the identify sector
yourself.
It's read and written by the 'Identify Device' and associated commands on
a
word basis. If the problem is bad ECC then changing values may correct
that
but bad data that is read only -such as the identification string- will
stay bad.

Meanwhile I will try it in another system

Pity: Seagate tend to warranty their drives and replace where
necessary:
Western Digital seem to try to get out of warranties after a few months:
I
suppose I have now discovered why?

Licensed to Quill


"Folkert Rienstra" wrote in message
...
If the IDENTIFY sector can not be read, several things may go wrong.
Lots of setup info is stored there.

"Licensed to Quill" wrote in
message ...
I am having a problem with a Western Digital 6 gig HD

I am trying to install XP. It wont format FAT32. XP Install tried
twice
but wont complete and eventually tells me that it cant format it.
But it
WILL format NTFS??? It then installs the initial install files and
fails on
the next boot with the error message

Couldn't open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)
NTLDR: Couldn't open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0) partition(1).


So I can boot off a Windows 2000 floppy and see all the files in a
Windows
directory but cant continue the install of the OS. I tried restorin
g the
MBR with fdisk /mbr which didn't seem to do anything

I downloaded the Diagnostic file from the slightly unhelpful Western
Digital site and ran it but it cant even identify the drive. Chkdsk
works
and the diags program does do the diags but identifies the drive
type
as LTLTLTLTLTLTLTTLTL and identifies the drive serial number as
LLLLLLLLTTTTTTTTTTTTLLLLLLLLLLLL and firmware as &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&.
Western Digital merely told me that this MAY mean that the hard
drive has
failed and can or cant be resuscitated, which covers most bases.
They sent me
on a bit of a wild goose chase to the LIFEGUARD diagnostics again to
read the
error code which is 0457, which they say means "Identified Data Not
Found.
Several instances of information on data positioning and location
could not be
found. Drive should be replaced."

Can this drive be resuscitated? It doesn't seem to be in all that
bad a
condition to me if it can run chkdsk without problems?? I am much
more
suspicious of their own utility which cant identify their own drive.
WHen I
have had any drive die on me, however bad they have been, they have
always
been able to read their own name, drive type and usually firmware??

Licensed to Quill

In , Licensed to Quill wrote:
Listen, guys I really am grateful to you for your assistance even if it was
to the effect that the drive is sick and / or dying.

However I have one last question:

This is obviously only an experimental drive with nothing in particular on
it. After seeing all your diagnoses I gave up on installing XP on it as it
wont actually boot or go through the second boot during the install process.

However I then put it in the computer as a slave and it SEEMS to work
perfectly as a slave in Windows XP?? I haven't tried running any utilities
on it as I did the upgrade from Me to XP and my Systemworks in still
configured for Me and wont do much in an XP system. As I have Systemworks
2001 which was designed for Windows 2000 installed and working in a Windows
2000 system, I am a bit reluctant to believe the Norton propaganda about it
being catastrophically disastrous for use with XP since XP IS an NT OS and
is only an incremental advance (if that is the proper word for a system
which constantly nags you about all sorts of things such as to activate it
and tell Microsoft that you are renting a system from them) over 2000 and
uses all the sale technology and am considering uninstalling and
re-installing systemworks 2001 in this computer to see what happens when I
try to run Norton Disc Doctor which (I think???) is one of the utilities
which still works in NT and with a NTFS drive.

That isn't a question.


Now that I have got this sick drive working (and, again, don't need to get
anything off it) are there any utilities which I can run on it at all?

That is.

You can run Bart's DISKTool
www.nu2.nu/utilities


L2Q

"Folkert Rienstra" wrote in message ...

In , Licensed to Quill wrote:

[snip]

Please snip the garbage next time or set your linelengths correctly.