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Hard Drive failure

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by peter

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Hi Everyone,

I fitted a 10.2 gig hard drive to a machine, it auto detected everything O.K. so I decided to install the IDE drivers from the motherboard CD rom, I wish I had not, The P.C. will not boot now, Nortons tell me the last sector of "C" drive cannot be read. Nortons attempted to repair but then said the boot file was corrupt, I then Fdisked the drive and reformmatted but now windows will not install, error message says windows does not reconize the file system, I have used a win 98 se boot disk. I noticed when I reformatted the disk capacity was not 10.2 but 9.777 HELP HELP HELP

peter

11 replies

by csmith

You did not say what brand of hard disk, so: The largest manufacturer is Seagate. Use the Seagate utilities from their website. Zero fill the drive. Partition the drive with Win98, format with Win98, and run D:\setup.exe . Do NOT run or install the CD-ROM driver, unless you want to waste a lot of time, and start pulling out your hair.
The procedure will have slight variations according to the drive manufacturer, but what I have outlined works 98% of the time.
Unfortunately one manufacturers utilities do not work with another manufacturers hard drive.

by csmith

The other 2% consists of rare problems, such as on time there was some strange conflict and I had to manually load the BIOS with Cyl. Head, and Sec. and put the drive in Normal.
Good luck, Chris

by whoozhe

First A 10.2 gig drive is actually 9.7 gigs. Computers base everything on binary digits so sizes end up being powers of 2. A real 1 gig is 2 to the power of 30 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. Manufactures call 1 billion bytes a gig. Also only 95% of a HD isusable after formatting.
It is always a good idea to get the latest drivers for hardware before installing anything new.

by peter

The problem started when I installed the new IDE drivers off the motherboard CDrom, instead of using Windows98, it was O.K when I used the W98se generic drivers.

Peter

by cdobbin

Although the problem occured when you installed the drivers(IDE) it sounds like a drive problem. You say after you fdisked the drive you still get errors tells you its not a driver problem. Remove all partitions and then run fdisk /mbr which re-intializes the master boot record. Set up your partitions and try to install and see if you still get the error.
Hope this helps.

by david balogh

the first response was right, goto the website of the harddrive manafaturer and download a program that will "low level format" the hard drive. The use FDisk again to set it up correctly. This way even IF the drive does have any bad sectors it willnot even look at them anymore.
Then you can proceed with the windows installation. But wait before you install anything from the motherboard CD. I have the ASUS CUV4X motherboard and i use WIN98 SE and when i first setup the system i put the drivers on from the cd and windows just kept having the blue-screen-of-death all the time... so i formatted and installed windows again but not the drivers from the motherboard cd, and i was told by a friend that unless windows is having problems the drivers it comes with should be fine.

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