FDISK and HDDs

[bewty]

Ok, Here is my question.
I am trying to possibly revive a hdd.

What happened:

Had win 98, but when you went to start the computer, it would not start win. it would show the splash screen, then give me a data error on drive c.

ran powermax on the drive and all the tests passed except the burn-in test. that one failed.

got the drive formatted, however, cannot fdisk the drive, it goes into the drive integrity test, gets to about 3% then starts over. does this for about an hour then tells me that there is not enought space to create a dos partition.

used the utility from western digital (it's a western digital drive) and it formatted, partitioned, and re-formatted the drive. said that the drive was ready for OS installation.

Tried to install win98, however, gave me an error - usually telling me that there is a data error on drive c.

does this mean that the drive is totally done? or is there something else I can try?

[PoonDoggy]

I would try writing zeros to the whole drive 5 - 8 times. There are utilities out there to do this...Wipe Drive is one of them.

[stroyal]

This works to recove bad sectors sometimes.

http://www.computing.net/faq/contentdos/badsector.html

[bewty]

ok, i will try the computing.net idea.

as for the writing of zeros...tried that already. used the powermax utility. did it about 10 times......LOL

[bewty]

ok, tried the computing.net idea...

however, now i am getting a new message, says "incorrect DOS version"

then after that it says success.

trying fdisk again...still getting stuck in the drive integrity check. I will try the western digital version and see what happens & post back

(unrelated, but how do u get the avatars? i tried and can't seem to figure it out)

[butch81385]

i believe its 50 posts for a custom avatar

[bewty]

ok. ran the western digital utility, and created my partitions. it also formatted them. when i run fdisk now, it shows the 2 partitions that i created.

i restarted the computer with the boot disk and the win98 cd and chose the first option to install without formatting, which is what the wd utility told me to do. it says that it has to perform a routine check on my system, and i hit enter. then it stops and just hangs. the hdd light is on steady and there are no sounds from the tower except the fans.

what next??

[bewty]

Originally posted by butch81385
i believe its 50 posts for a custom avatar

Thanks, I guess i am going to have to start posting away then, huh??