hard drive problem

1540 Views 4 Replies 5 Participants Last post by johnwill, Jan 15, 2003

kfaday

Discussion Starter · Dec 18, 2002

Hello,
I've got a problem with a 20gb Maxtor hard disk. I have the Operative system of my second computer in it. It began giving me problems so i tried to install win me again, i got problems as well so i ran scandisk and it never finished.
I downloaded a bootable disk from maxtor.com, and i did the advanced test. It found problems, and it said that they were corrected. I wanted to install win Xp but when i formated to NTFS the installer said that the format couldn't be done because there were errors in the disk. I formated with Fat32 and there were no problems. I istalled win me, but i got lots of problems with the installation as well, and i got lots of blue screens saying that a write operation on drive c couldn't be performed.
I ran maxtor'd diskette again and i did a low level format. Then i 'exercised' the disk for 2 hours (an operation that writes in every portion of the disk) and i had no trouble.
But then again i couldn't format with NTFS and i had the same blue screen with win me.

the warranty is over. should i throw it to the garbage??

thanks for your help!!!

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Pseudocyber

· #2 · Dec 18, 2002

yeah, IMHO, get a new drive. They're pretty cheap now. I'd recommend Western Digital.

Ps. Welcome!

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merlin

· #3 · Dec 18, 2002

yeah, try to sell it or trade it in....Not worth pulling your hair over it as it seems to have some serious damage to the drive... you can go to http://www.pricewatch.com and compare prices on there

and yeah, welcome to the forums !!!!

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snacknmunch

· #4 · Jan 14, 2003

Maybe try wiping the drive with a debug script may save it try this and see if it works
obviously you need to have a boot floopy with the debug program on it but give this a shot after doing the script reboot it if your going to install windows xp just use the xp cd to boot up and it will prompt you to partion and format the drive
debug <Enter>
-F 200 L1000 0 <Enter>
-A CS:100 <Enter>
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 <Enter>
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 <Enter>
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 <Enter>
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 <Enter> (Type 80 for the main hard drive - hd 0, or type 81 for the second hard drive - hd 1)
xxxx:010C INT 13 <Enter>
xxxx:010E INT 20 <Enter>
xxxx:0110 <Enter>
-G <Enter>

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johnwill

· #5 · Jan 15, 2003

FWIW, I've never had an IDE disk recover by using the manufacturer's format. Once bad sectors start showing up, it's usually curtains for most cheap IDE drives.

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