Can this hard drive be saved?

Status
Not open for further replies.

Dean66

In Runtime
Messages
111
I just recently built a new computer with a serial ATA hard drive, and thus, decided to put my older WD 20 GB IDE drive in an older computer.

When I booted up the old system, the post screen said, "imminent hard drive failure". I tried reformatting it with my Win XP CD. After I chose the partitions and told it to install XP to the C drive, it attempted to do so, but seemed to hang without making much progress at all. After about 10 minutes, it told me the disk is damaged.

Is there any way to repair it? I would really like to use this disk if I could. It's only a couple of years old. I'm not very familiar with DOS commands.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
What do you mean by save it?
If you mean recover the data, You may be able to. If you mean use the hard drive, I dont think so.

Can you hear if this drive is even spinning up?
 
I don't care about the data. I just want to be able to reformat it and use it in the old system. It appears to be corrupt somehow.

I do hear it spinning.
 
I would say the hard drive is on its way out

if you want to use it and see if it will live, first you can disable the warning by disabling "SMART drive capability" in BIOS

then you can try deleting the partition and reformatting (all data will be wiped)
if you have a windows 98 CD, put that in on boot and select "start computer with CDROM support"

this should bring you to a DOS window. type fdisk, and delete the partition of your drive

then remake the partition, and when you install XP, format it (you will have to anyway)
 
Well just format it.

Even if it does work which I doubt since you already try'ed formattting, I wouldnt trust my data to it
 
Well,

I ran killdisk on it and erased everything, but it doesn't seem to have helped. I put in the Win XP disk to reformat, and it's trying, but it's only made minimal progress(4% in 20 minutes). Something is definitely wrong. I've done many re-installs before and I know that it doesn't take this long.

Is there any way to fix the disk if it has bad sectors? I don't know what the problem is and am running out of options.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom