Help formatting a hdd?

[Truman42]

@ Warm beer. I did have an external cradle OUAT but not anymore. I might have to slave it to my PC and try to reformat it that way but thats a PITA having to drag the PC desk out and open it up so was tryin to avoid it.

@GuyQLD... Its a Toshiba 80gb laptop hdd. The bios has stuff all information about the drives details. Just has its serial number and size from memory. This Bios is very limited in its information compared to what a PC bios shows you.

It doesnt show any details during POST and stops at a screen with two options to iether continue with XP setup or boot to XP. Both options end up failing.

@Djar..I cant boot to widnows at all, ive wiped the data from this drive using a utility. Now im just trying to get XP or win 7 to detect it on install.

thanks gents will keep trying you suggestions.

 

[DU99]

see if you can onto

DJ_L3ThAL he fixes all things computer

 

[grantb]

You could try just nuking the partition table entirely. From your knoppix live DVD, simply dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdv bs=512 count=1

After that, you should be able to go ahead and partition it as normal. Just ensure you don't initialise it with a GPT table, which XP probably won't understand (it's a newer format).

This all assumes that the drive controller isn't boned, but I figure if knoppix can see it, it's ok.

 

[grantb]

I should add that this assumes sdv is the disk you want to operate on. You can always back the partition table up first for later restore should you have a mishap.

dd if=/dev/sdv of=/some/file/on/usb bs=512 count=1

 

[mwd]

I would be inclined to not bother with it and buy a 2TB drive for about $150.00 and reload to it.

 

[bum]

I seem to recall reading two companies bragging about their shiny new 1TB laptop drives very recently. Where are you getting 2TB ones from?

 

[WarmBeer]

TIL Tropical Brews has a time machine.

 

[mwd]

I have got a Western Digital Essentials 2.5" external hard drive just take it out of the enclosure.

http://www.staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=2Tb+2.5%22+HD&spos=3

Maybe they are too thick to fit in a laptop.

P.S. got mine from Bing Lee online $149.00 and free shipping

 

[pk.sax]

T

You can get a sata to USB adapter off eBay for very little, it plugs into the drive and you might be able to get windows 7 to fix the partition up for you.

P

 

[GuyQLD]

If BIOS is detecting the drive when you go into the basic setup (as it sounds) but then you're not getting a line on the POST section your SATA settings are still incorrect (you might have the SATA turned on, but have the mode incorrect)

Also try booting it without a CD in the drive (I'm guessing you're running CD above HDD in the boot options) what error message do you get?

You should get either a can't read or not found error. Pretty sure they're slightly different and that will tell you to keep messing with BIOS settings or move onto finding the HDD drivers (Also, is your XP CD service pack 1 or 3? I have one of each and only use Service Pack 3 as it detects some drives that service pack 1 won't)

I also think you should give grantb's idea of nuking the partition table a shot. If the old man was half way through an install there could be all sorts of problems which a low level format / changing the partition tables might fix.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

You could try this..

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Have used it before. Is niice

 

[pcmfisher]

Win7 has drivers for xp, so if you have tried a win7 disc and it doesn't work its not a driver problem.

For my money its a bois setting not right or the drive is buggered.