vertigoelectric
Technical User
I have an internal Maxtor 40GB HDD and am using it in an external casing that connects it to my PC via firewire and/or USB. I would have liked to recover the data from it, but I gave up on that and decided to format and use its space for other things.
I have tried many things to get this disk to format, and none of them have worked.
Windows Disk Management shows me that it DOES see the HDD connected and it appears as 40GB of unallocated space. If the HDD is connected when I open the Disk Management console, it gives me the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard, but the wizard does not initialize the drive at all. The only options Disk Management gives me for this HDD are "Initialize" and "Properties"... neither of which do anything.
Partition Magic also shows the HDD as Unallocated. It gives me an option to create a partition on the HDD, however, at the beginning of the process, I get an ERROR #986 "Unable to get information for the specified partition". I have researched this error and did not find any real help.
I have tried shutting down my computer, connecting this HDD as my master, inserting the Windows XP CD, and formatting it using the CD's installation process. However, after setup has finished loading installation files and says "Setup is starting Windows" at the bottom of the screen, it freezes there and will eventually restart the PC by itself without going any further.
When the HDD is connected as a slave drive on my system, Windows will not start. It will freeze just as the Windows XP loading screen is starting to fade in. If started in Safe Mode, the PC freezes during the long list it displays of the files it is loading. I noticed it always stops right after MVD.DLL (or is it MUD.DLL? I do not remember).
I have tried booting to a floppy diskette while the HDD is connected as my master drive. I tried using FDISK and didn't get anywhere. It did appear to allow me to restore a 'generic' MBR to the drive and all of that (does that make sense?), but in the long run, didn't help anything at all.
I have tried using the GetDataBack program to see if perhaps it could recover anything. It was able to see the HDD just fine on the firewire connection. After beginning a scan, it gave me nothing but errors about bad sectors and such.
None of the other hard disk utilities i could find/download were able to help at all...
After researching briefly on this site, I downloaded MaxBlast 3. This is my next step. I will try this and come back to see if anyone has responded to my issue.
I am beginning to wonder if the drive has become damaged beyond repair, but I don't want to give up on it quite yet.
Oh, and also, this might be a helpful bit of information for someone who's trying to help: This HDD came out of my sister's computer, which was left on 24/7. I was the only one who used it anymore, so nobody messed with it. I came to the PC one day to find that it had rebooted itself and stopped during the boot process, stating something about having no system disk or OS, or something similar, making it apparent there was a HDD problem. I don't know what caused it to restart.
I have tried many things to get this disk to format, and none of them have worked.
Windows Disk Management shows me that it DOES see the HDD connected and it appears as 40GB of unallocated space. If the HDD is connected when I open the Disk Management console, it gives me the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard, but the wizard does not initialize the drive at all. The only options Disk Management gives me for this HDD are "Initialize" and "Properties"... neither of which do anything.
Partition Magic also shows the HDD as Unallocated. It gives me an option to create a partition on the HDD, however, at the beginning of the process, I get an ERROR #986 "Unable to get information for the specified partition". I have researched this error and did not find any real help.
I have tried shutting down my computer, connecting this HDD as my master, inserting the Windows XP CD, and formatting it using the CD's installation process. However, after setup has finished loading installation files and says "Setup is starting Windows" at the bottom of the screen, it freezes there and will eventually restart the PC by itself without going any further.
When the HDD is connected as a slave drive on my system, Windows will not start. It will freeze just as the Windows XP loading screen is starting to fade in. If started in Safe Mode, the PC freezes during the long list it displays of the files it is loading. I noticed it always stops right after MVD.DLL (or is it MUD.DLL? I do not remember).
I have tried booting to a floppy diskette while the HDD is connected as my master drive. I tried using FDISK and didn't get anywhere. It did appear to allow me to restore a 'generic' MBR to the drive and all of that (does that make sense?), but in the long run, didn't help anything at all.
I have tried using the GetDataBack program to see if perhaps it could recover anything. It was able to see the HDD just fine on the firewire connection. After beginning a scan, it gave me nothing but errors about bad sectors and such.
None of the other hard disk utilities i could find/download were able to help at all...
After researching briefly on this site, I downloaded MaxBlast 3. This is my next step. I will try this and come back to see if anyone has responded to my issue.
I am beginning to wonder if the drive has become damaged beyond repair, but I don't want to give up on it quite yet.
Oh, and also, this might be a helpful bit of information for someone who's trying to help: This HDD came out of my sister's computer, which was left on 24/7. I was the only one who used it anymore, so nobody messed with it. I came to the PC one day to find that it had rebooted itself and stopped during the boot process, stating something about having no system disk or OS, or something similar, making it apparent there was a HDD problem. I don't know what caused it to restart.