can't read my partitioned D drive

[sweetpea88]

Hi guys,

Can you help me with this problem? I am a newbie when it comes to troubleshooting computers. I have a partitioned D drive that is not responding in Windows Explorer. It comes up with the following windows error message: "the request could not be performed because of an i/o device error".

What can I do?
Thanks,
Sweetpea

 

[sweetpea88]

Just some more information: I am running Windows XP. When I go to "My Computer/Manage/Storage/Disk Management", it shows that both my C drive (NTFS file system) has a status of "Healthy (System)", and my D drive (FAT32 file system) has a status of "Healthy (Active)".

Would reformating my D drive help?

 

[garebo]

I take it you dont have a cdrom or any optical drive installed, only 2 hard drives?
Reformatting sounds like the way to go. Perhaps you might consider NTFS to match the other drive. The reason is that if you save files with long names and go to move them back and forth (backup) between the 2 drives, you can run into problems. I know, been there, done that.

If the drive wont format then make a win98 boot disk, once in dos, then from a floppy run the hard drive diagnostic program, look for the command to write zeroes to the hard drive and use that, then use fdisk to partition and format the drive. It can only do the format in fat32 but thats ok. When you get it going and reformatted then you can boot into windows xp and format it again, this time NTFS.
Doing the formatting twice helps you feel more comfortable that the drive is good. The zero write sets the drive up to factory specs and also eliminates any virus as well.


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