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Hard disk problem

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by may_day

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y laptop won?t boot up on my hard disk so I decided to run a disk test using scandisk but scandisk could not run because it cannot detect my hard disk. I decided to format my hard disk using disk manager 2.56 then it detected my hd and formats it. Now I?m installing win98 SE on the newly formatted disk, another problem comes up??the installation process would only go up to ?copying needed files? then it would hang?..so I decided to fdisk the said hd and format it again using window 98 boot disk. The formatting started on 1 % then it say ?allocating #######? where ###### is the number I could not remember, the formatting went on for about an hour having the same message ?allocating ###### on different % of the formatting process after theformatting is finished i got another message that says ?formatted 100 % ?
?Format terminated.?

To make it short the system still won?t recognize the formatted HD. Before I could still use my laptop normally. Please Help. By the way the HD brandis toshiba and the laptop is a compaq presario 1200XL-110. thank.

mike

13 replies

by dmiles

It may be that the hard drive is going bad and cannot be be reconized because of bad sectors

Before format and partitiong the drive run fdisk /mbr

Now run setup and see if scan disk will recognize the drive

by buyeda

If you were able to use access the hard disk normally and then you started having problems the first thing I would try is getting a clean write protected floppy with an anti-virus program on it and boot up the computer with it and check for viruses. To clarify what I mean by "clean" in case you are unsure, is one that has been formatted and scanned for viruses using up to date virus definitions. What you are describing could be the reuslt of a virus. The other possibility is as was suggestedby soulrider that the hard disk is failing.

by michelinda

I agree with the previous answer. Try to find a good bootable floppy with fdisk and scandisk on it and run the full surface scan. Sounds to me like you have bad sectors.

I am not familiar with Disk Manager 2.56, but if you can go all the way to a fdisk, make new partitions, scandisk with a full surface scan, you should be okay. If it finds bad sectors, chances are you are losing your hard drive, but it should mark them as unusable and let you install the operating system.

You may have been able to use it before, as long as the offending sectors weren't being used. It may be trying to put operating system on a bad sector now though, or even using it as swap file - and that won't work.

Good luck!

by otl

I would suspect you lost the configuration for the HD or at least the LBA support in the BIOS. By the OS the CMOS battery could be going bad, check and/or replace.

Problem # 1 Compaq uses a proprietary hard-drive configuration for the OEM setup.Problem # 2 Disk manager is proprietary software used to manage large harddrives and loads itself on boot-up from the HD, if not loaded the HD appears to be empty and un-partitioned.

Only know this because I ran into it while trying to install a new HD in a Presario and HP. After unloading the DM program and allowing the CMOS to auto-detect the HD was I able to do the standard Fdisk, format, and OS load.

by l_shangali

Your hard disk might be having a bad sectors that is why format have been terminated.And the bad sectors are in the first sectors,that is why you could not even finnish installing win98.
By now you cannot scan the disk for errors untill format is finished.
What am suggesting is try taking the hard disk in another laptop i.e Toshiba and format it using the new laptop.

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