i posted this in the Discussion area but was advised that i would do better to post it here in the Q&A so here it is again :
have a 4.3 gig Seagate ATA drive which is completely inaccessable and only very rarely will show up as recognized during POST. when it does appear i quickly F-key to a command prompt boot so i can try to FDISK and FORMAT the drive so it will be available to my system for extra storage, but always to no avail. the computer just hangs at 0% done while ‘verifying drive integrity’ when i try to create a Primary DOS partition (there are no partitions on it as i was able to accomplish deleting all partitions on it recently hoping that repartitioning and formatting it might solve the problem, which i still think would work if i could only get it create a new partition in the first place). i currently have it in the Secondary Slave position with another Seagate ATA drive as Secondary Master (different model and size but ought to be compatible… shouldn’t it ?) andthat drive works fine. my Primary Master drive is a Western Digital and i have my CD-ROM as Primary Slave. i’ve tried the failing Seagate HD in all other possible combinations and positions in my system, both with position-specific jumper settings and with cable select jumpers, but the current configuration is the only one in which all three of the other drives (the WD, the working Seagate, and the CD-ROM) will work and work all the time. i’ve always gone into BIOS and specified the drives CHS settings under User Defined (as it never self-detects the drive) and it accepts the entered values fine so that’s not the problem. obviously, i really don’t care about retrieving the data that’s on the drive because i’m just going to format it anyway. all i want is to be able to use it. can anyone give me any ideas as to what the problem might be and whther or not it’s at all possible to recover this drive ?
