Error messages, Hard Drives

I have recently bought a new hard-drive, and payed the computer technicians at my university to transfer information from my old damaged hard drive to this new one. However, they also managed to copy over some bad sectors from the old drive. instead of ust transferring the few files that i required, they cloned my entire hard drive to this new hard drive.

this did not work, there were too many malfunctions with windows unable to recognize drivers for various components, not to mention the fact that the computer only recognized the area of the hard drive that had the cloned information on it. I realised that there was noway of keeping the files i wanted, so i backed them up to zip disks, and removed the partitions. The problem is; when i have tried to format the hard drive with a single partition it fails at about 80% completion. I have now partitioned the hard drive into two areas and have successfully formated the first area (area C:). However when i try to format the D: area on the hard drive i get the same message "not ready format terminated".

please help.

This question was answered on June 15, 2002. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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Perhaps there was not a logical drive created after you made the extended partition Working with extended partitions always requires two steps: first make the extended partition, then create logical drives within that extended partition If this is the case, then you will not see any drive letters beyond the C: drive in My Computer You can also see current partition information by typing the command FDISK /STATUS at an A: prompt or selecting #4-Display Partition Information from the FDISK main menu.

If you do not see the D: drive, go back into FDISK and select #1-Create DOS Partition, then select #2-create Extended DOS Partition ( the % of disk space or Mbytes should equal what is not being used by the C: drive) Press ENTER You should be prompted to create one or more logical drives, or make that selection from the FDISK main menu (#1-Create DOS Partition, then #3-Create Logical DOS Drives in the Extended DOS Partition) Just press ENTER to make the entire extended partition one logical drive To see the partition information, select #4 from the main menu and then reboot the system Hopefully, you can then format the D: drive.

You didn't mention anything in the error message about the system trying to recover lost allocation units An allocation unit is FORMAT's term for a cluster You report having trouble both times near the end of the hard disk, so maybe the drive has run across a bad cluster and is trying to fix it Try running SCANDISK with the Thorough option checked, if you loaded Windows 98 in the C: drive This will examine the entire disk for bad clusters, not just the file and folder areas You can also run SCANDISK from an A: prompt to see the condition of the drive and do repairs If you continue to get the "Trying to recover lost allocation unit" error, the hard disk may have been jostled/damaged while transporting it and may have to be replaced.

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Posted by Lois of Mesa Community College on June 15, 2002

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