PCA Forums

I was formatting a 2gb drive friday on a system i just put together and 95% into the format it tells me 'trying to recover allocation table',runs for a few minutes and says format terminated.From what i can tell this drive is working but i can't get it to format,Western Digital has me run a diag progam on it and the code it gave says drive is unrepairable(per WD Tech),bad drive maybe.Well i install another drive today,boot to a floppy,partition the drive,reboot and start to format.This time 4% into the format it does the same thing.Now i have 2 drives that are no good and i don't want a third.Bad power supply maybe,Any suggestions?????????

Do you have another computer you could put it in, and format it from windows?? I would try that. Or, what are the specs of the system that these bad drives are coming from?? Ever had any power related problems before??

Frost

Some possibilities:

- Both drives have some disk manager software installed on it (fdisking will not eliminate this). You need to run a disk manager program that can test for it and remove it. WDC's disk manager software (EZ Drive) will do this.
- There's a boot record virus on both hard drives. Format using the /mbr toggle on the end of the format command line.
- Bad controller
- Bad ribbon cable
- Bad power cable
- Dirty contacts on ribbon cable (pull and re-insert both ends)
- Your boot floppy has a boot sector virus - virus scan it

As the previous poster suggested, I would try to format the and/or run WDC's Lifeguard utility on both drives in ANOTHER computer 1st to make sure they're really bad.

Hope this helps...

I've formatted both these drives in the past,the first i had as a storage drive the second was a win98se drive prior to trying to format it.I replacedthe ide cable when i changed drives.this case shocked me(i felt a light current) once before about a year ago but i removed and remounted the power supply and it hasn't happen since(until now maybe)WD says the error message i recieved from running their program is unrepairable but i'll mess with this last drive some more.Any more suggestions
system specs:
abit bh6 rev 1.0
p2 400
192mb pc133
Guillemot TNT 2 Ultra
SB pci128

Do you have another computer you could try to format them in?? Maybe a neihbors/friends/coworkers??? (A work computer! )

Frost

i'll be installing a removable HD rack in this system as soon as i log off and i'm going to try formatting it again and if that doesn't work i'll try it in windows

Format using the /mbr toggle on the end of the format command line.

Not sure if FP meant to say this or not, but it is actually a cmd line swithc with FDISK, not FORMAT (i.e. 'fdisk /mbr').