Help formatting a hdd?

[Truman42]

Gday gents,

Im having problems with a hdd from my dads laptop. He tried to format the drive and re-install windows but somehow botched it so sent me the drive in the mail to see what I can do with it.

Ive plugged it into my laptop and booted to an xp install disc. Ive tried to get to the section whre you can install windows and format the drive but it crashes each time. The bios recognises the drive but for some reason I cant do much with it. Ive also tried and in stall from a windows 7 disc so I could format the drive when I get to that section of the install but in the drive selection window it doesnt show any drives.

So I basically need something I can install onto a bootable cd or dvd and then have the option to format or fdisck the drive so I can wipe it clean. Then I will send it back to him and he will re-install windows once its back in his laptop.

But there seems to be a lot of different utilites out there and Ive tried one or two that didnt really do much.

Any suggestions?

 

[Truman42]

Whenever I get to the setup section where I can choose to install XP it says a hard drive could not be found. But it's shown in the bios no problem.

 

[bum]

Windows isn't really my bag but it seems like you'll be pushing the proverbial uphill to do anything if your computer can't recognise the drive. Tried booting into safemode rather than installation media?

Long shot - get a Linux LiveCD/USB image and boot into that. If it recognises the drive then you'll have access to some better disk utilities and you can work from there.

 

[pk.sax]

Gparted is one utility I've used in the long gone past. Linux based I remember and worked out good.

 

[Truman42]

Thanks gents. I used a Linux live version of knoppix on USB and it had gparted on it.
It said that I have two partitions one 59 gb and the other around 14 gb. I was able to remove all data on these partitions but couldn't delete the actual partitions. But Xp doesn't see these partitions at all when trying to install it.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

Just wipe them and start from scratcg

 

[bum]

Gparted wouldn't let you remove them or you couldn't find it?

What I mean is, did you try and it told you that you couldn't do it? Because that would be a bit weird given that it let you delete the contents.

What might be worth trying is creating a new filesystem on that disk rather than trying to remove the old one.

 

[Truman42]

Gparted wouldn't let you remove them or you couldn't find it?

What I mean is, did you try and it told you that you couldn't do it? Because that would be a bit weird given that it let you delete the contents.

What might be worth trying is creating a new filesystem on that disk rather than trying to remove the old one.

Gparted only gave me the option to wipe all data from the two partitions which it called dev/sva and dev/svb.
It didn't have an option to remove either of the partitions. Although I could have split either partition and added another partition but that's the only real option I had.
I wanted to remove the two partitions and create a new one using the full drive size. Basically the same thing I would normally do using the xp disk.

Doing a bit more reading it might be something to do with the fact that the drive is a SATA drive and XP setup disc doesn't have drivers for it. So I have to find some drivers and slip stream it into an XP install disc or something like that, (I'm still researching)
What I don't get is why I would need to do this when I originally installed XP on this hard drive without any problems at all. I never had driver issues back then.

 

[bum]

Gparted only gave me the option to wipe all data from the two partitions which it called dev/sva and dev/svb.
It didn't have an option to remove either of the partitions. Although I could have split either partition and added another partition but that's the only real option I had.

Right-click the image thing for the whole drive and select "unmount" then you should be able to delete the partitions.

What I don't get is why I would need to do this when I originally installed XP on this hard drive without any problems at all. I never had driver issues back then.

Was it a clean install or where you installing on top of a retail XP install? Not sure if this might be the reason because XP lol.

 

[Truman42]

Was it a clean install or where you installing on top of a retail XP install? Not sure if this might be the reason because XP lol.

My dad orignally had a clean install of Xp that started playing up. I told him to boot to the XP disc and format the drive so he could do a clean install but thats when he started having problems.

The version of Gparted I had was an application within a Knoppix live distro. It didnt have an image of the drive. Just listed the partition. If I right clicked it I had a couple of options but none of them was to unmount the drive. I did try a bootable verison of gparted but it gave me a disc error once loaded.
I will perservere tonight when I get home and may be try and find another vesion of Gparted as a standalone bootable option and see if I can unmount the drive.

Thanks once again.

 

[mxd]

sounds like hdd is dead, if you grab on of these (probably cheaper at MSY ?) then see if you can see the drive on you pc, save his data then do a format.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

What I don't get is why I would need to do this when I originally installed XP on this hard drive without any problems at all. I never had driver issues back then.

Thats windows for you

 

[manticle]

Not anywhere close to it nerd here but have you tried something like dban?

 

[bum]

It does sounds a bit rooted.

Gparted is just a program so you can't boot into it like an OS. The Gparted on Knoppix should be a recent, stable version. I'm not sure you're going to get any better results with a different version.

 

[bum]

Not anywhere close to it nerd here but have you tried something like dban?

Yeah, that's a good tool for wiping the drive but it won;t work if he can't get an OS to detect the drive first.

The fact that BIOS is seeing the drive and no OS can is weird. I'd be investigating (but not randomly changing!) BIOS settings.

 

[Truman42]

The Bios and Knoppix can see the drive. Its just Xp that wont.
I was able to use Gparted to wipe the drive completely but Im now trying to remove both partitions and re-create 1 partition the size of the full hdd which is 80 gb.

Ive done this before using the XP setup disc numerous times. But for some reason XP wont detect that the HDD even exists. Thats why im thinking maybe the posts Ive read about SATA drivers is the culprit.

 

[WarmBeer]

The Bios and Knoppix can see the drive. Its just Xp that wont.
I was able to use Gparted to wipe the drive completely but Im now trying to remove both partitions and re-create 1 partition the size of the full hdd which is 80 gb.

Ive done this before using the XP setup disc numerous times. But for some reason XP wont detect that the HDD even exists. Thats why im thinking maybe the posts Ive read about SATA drivers is the culprit.

You're assumption about SATA being the culprit is _probably_ correct.

If you have an external HDD cradle handy, you might have better luck accessing the drive by putting it in that, and booting from it. Seems counter-intuitive, but the USB standard is a lot more uniform than the vagaries of various hardware and disk firmware vendors.

Disclaimer: software nerd, not hardware nerd.

 

[wbosher]

Windows 7 should detect it if the only issue is that it's a SATA drive, but your original post said that didn't work either.

 

[GuyQLD]

You're assumption about SATA being the culprit is _probably_ correct.

If you have an external HDD cradle handy, you might have better luck accessing the drive by putting it in that, and booting from it. Seems counter-intuitive, but the USB standard is a lot more uniform than the vagaries of various hardware and disk firmware vendors.

Disclaimer: software nerd, not hardware nerd.

+1

This has been my experience. My only comment would be in diagnosing would be start with the drive setup in you BIOS - Does it detect the drive, cylinder counts, capacity, serial number? Then power on the PC - does the POST show the same drive, capacity etc. Make sure you have a copy of the drivers on CD / USB (CD for XP install, either for win 7 install from memory).

If it can't detect everything properly then your SATA settings are totally wrong - if it detects it but then windows doesn't then they might still be wrong, but it's looking more like a driver issue.

I also can't remember the util's on the XP disk, does it have the capability to load a RAM drive? I vaguely remember having to boot to something like that once to fix a master boot record on a drive before I could do anything. I know you can access fdisk and a few other utilities outside of the windows installer, and I always had more success but it's been over 2 years since I've used a windows CD (laugh all you want, but I love Windows 7, Previously I'd do a clean install quarterly - now I don't bother)

It's not a Seagate 80GB SATA drive is it? XP is missing the drivers for that and wont detect without installing the drivers as part of the install.

 

[djar007]

Is it initialised. Right click my computer. Go to manage. Etc. And check to see if it is initialised. Sata works fine with xp.