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hard drive problem

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by cabal1208

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A friend of mine gave me his hard drive to fix with very little information about how it stoped working. anyway ever test i ran said that there weren errors on every sector and every computer that i put it in read it as a non-formated drive but if it's booted as the only one in the computer the screen show as if its trying to load windows 98 but something is missing. windows xp was installed.
thanks in advanced

3 replies

by thechas

Sounds like the drive has a drive / BIOS overlay program installed.

If so, this program resides in the Master Boot Record of the drive, and needs to be installed on the boot drive of any system that attempts to access the drive.

The testing and file access you have performed on the drive may have damaged the drive contents, or the drive overlay software.

Start with this drive as the Primary Master (C:) on a test system, and boot up from the drive manufactures drive setup utility disk.

Have it set up the drive and test it.

With any luck, you will recover the drive.

Otherwise, it may be time to start over.
Just make sure that your friends system can handle the drive without the utility.

Chas

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