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Hard Drive Ooops
Deleted the master DOS partition - now what?

New MessageHard Drive Ooops (modified 0 times) Rezz
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I reformatted a hard drive in preparation for making my first attempt at installing a LINUX OS. I reformatted it while booted off a DOS diskette and deleted ALL existing partitions using FDISK. It took a long time to format but when it finished there was a message about format completed successfully. The problem is that the HD is now completely unusable, any attempt to use it brings up a message about no master DOS partition exists. I can't even get a reformat option when booting from a diskette and FDISK doesn't want anything to do with it.

In my searches for a resolution to this problem I've come across reference information about "Low Level" formating but nothing that explains what it is or how to do it. What does it take to do a low level format and how is it done?

I have another HD but it has some bad sectors on it and any attempt to install even DOS always seems to require one or more of the bad sectors and nothing will boot from it. Is there some sort of shareware program capable of blocking out the bad sectors so as to make the drive usable again? Any suggestions on how to get either of these drives working again would be greatly appreciated

04-14-2002 15:28:16

New MessageRE:Hard Drive Ooops (modified 0 times) oldman
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Rezz:

go to http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part and download Ranish Partition Manager VER 4.20.

unzip it to a DOS boot floppy disk.

make sure your computer detects your Ooops drive at start-up or bios cmos setup IDE HDD AUTO DETECTION.

run 'part' from the floppy at a DOS 'a:\' prompt.

make sure you are looking at the correct h.d. push F5 to change hd if you have your Ooops drive installed as d: or other drive.

Partition Manager can set up your partitions, make the drive active and format the drive in almost any o.s. you want. do not push F2 to save your partition info until you have the hd set up the way you want. take your time. read the display and learn what the program can do before you push F2.

have fun

oldman
04-14-2002 17:47:46

New MessageRE:Hard Drive Ooops (modified 0 times) Finatronics
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IBM www.ibm.com has a utility called "Wipe.com" it comes in a self-extracting executable file called "wipe.exe". This is a low-level formatter. It writes 0 to every bit on the drive. After that you can use FDISK like normal... This should fix any software/partition/virus issues. It will even fix bad sectors in most cases (unless of course, the sectors are physically bad...) I've done it many many times.
04-14-2002 18:19:10

New MessageRE:Hard Drive Ooops (modified 0 times) gogetone
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Although I haven't tried Ranish, I have used Zap.exe with excellent results also on IBM site.


http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm

04-15-2002 09:09:07

New MessageRE:Hard Drive Ooops (modified 0 times) Finatronics
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AFAIK, Zap only erases the partition info (a tiny chunk of information at the beginning of the drive). That's fine if that's all you're trying to do, but it will NOT delete information off the drive, and I highly doubt it will attempt to recover sectors marked bad. I've never run into a case where I would see any use for zap, can you explain it a bit? It seems like it's just the same as going into fdisk and deleting all partitions. Is it different?
04-15-2002 20:05:58

New MessageRE:Hard Drive Ooops (modified 0 times) gogetone
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I reformatted a hard drive in preparation for making my first attempt at installing a LINUX OS. I reformatted it while booted off a DOS diskette and deleted ALL existing partitions using FDISK. It took a long time to format but when it finished there was a message about format completed successfully. The problem is that the HD is now completely unusable, any attempt to use it brings up a message about no master DOS partition exists. I can't even get a reformat option when booting from a diskette and FDISK doesn't want anything to do with it.

Zap may fix this problem, you will then need to partition and format again.

I have another HD but it has some bad sectors on it and any attempt to install even DOS always seems to require one or more of the bad sectors and nothing will boot from it. Is there some sort of shareware program capable of blocking out the bad sectors so as to make the drive usable again? Any suggestions on how to get either of these drives working again would be greatly appreciated

I completely agree with Finatronics, use Wipe on this drive. My experience as well, is it may fix defects but not physical sector or platter damage.

GoGetOne
04-17-2002 09:21:23

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