H/D horror! Help!!!!

Richard_UK · Post by **Richard_UK** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 7:56 am

need advice anyone help, a week ago i was one of the victims who was infected with the "Blaster worm" it caused mayhem with my system,i did manage to remove the blaster worm but not before it destroyed my hard drive! i ended up buying a replacement. what i want to know is i have tried to format the old h/d to see if i can salvage it but i cannot format it no matter what i try it just says "unable to format, the hard drive is damaged or has been infected with a virus" any ideas? or is it now trash?

tnx

Freddy · Post by **Freddy** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 12:57 pm

How'd u go about formattin it?

Richard_UK · Post by **Richard_UK** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 1:28 pm

well i tried to format with the Xp Disc by doing a complete new intalation, but it would'nt have it. not too sure how to format anyother way (sorry im a novice)

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 1:38 pm

Try deleting the partition, then creating the partition again. Then format.

Richard_UK · Post by **Richard_UK** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 1:51 pm

Originally posted by YeOldeStonecat
Try deleting the partition, then creating the partition again. Then format.

Tried that, it wont

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 2:30 pm

Lets start from scratch. How are you trying to format the old HD? Through Windows slaved to the new HD, as a D drive or something? Trying to format through My Computer?

Or through the boot setup?

Freddy · Post by **Freddy** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 4:49 pm

Use Fdisk (at command prompt).

LT-73 · Post by **LT-73** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 4:57 pm

I dunno cat, maybe he should just RMA it and save himself the trouble

Richard_UK · Post by **Richard_UK** » Sun Aug 24, 2003 5:42 am

ok when i first tried to format the h/d it was done when it was still in my system (before i added the new h/d) at this point windows would not even load all i got was the loading page that said "Windows Xp Professional" you know the one where you have the bar with the blue dot going back and forth, it wouldnt go any further that that. so i decided to reinstall, i put in the xp disc, shut down pc and restarted, cutting a long story short it finaly asked me if i wanted to delete the original partition (i think it was something like "press L to delete" i then got a yellow bar saying it was deleting the exsisting partition to install a fresh copy of windows, after about 20 min waiting for it to format thats when i got the original error message!

( installed as a slave)
i also tried going to " my computer" right clicking on "drive F" (it was given this name by windows when i added the drive as a slave) then tried the format option, it said "windows cannot format this drive as its in use"?? what i did notice is that my pc was great until i added the damaged H/D ie it took 20 min to load windows from my new drive, then it would preform really bad everything i did took minutes to load even clicking on "start" took about 60 sec to expand??

sorry to go on guys but im trying to give you a good picture of what im getting

Richard_UK · Post by **Richard_UK** » Sun Aug 24, 2003 5:44 am

and they say pc's make life easier!!

Richard_UK · Post by **Richard_UK** » Fri Aug 29, 2003 1:51 pm

Ok heres a update regarding my H/D.

Problem solved

managed to Format the drive and insatll a fresh copy of windows. and it works great!!!!!

tnx to everybody who helped!!

hardnut · Post by **hardnut** » Thu Sep 11, 2003 10:41 pm

For future reference, you could have installed Linux on the drive (completely kills windows partitions with the right options) and then removed the linux partitions (non-dos)...

But out of interest, how did you get round the problem?