Disappearing Disk Drives

[tekola]

What does it mean when the hard drive is autiodetected by the BIOS, every other boot? I have checked for viruses. Replaced hard drive. Second hard drive experiences same symptoms. Now you see it, now you don't. When it boots to floppy, Scandisk reports FAT error prevents ScanDisk from running with original drive. Part 2: Dos FDISK /MBR force a reformat? or fix FAT? OLD Windows 95 133mhz system. Award Bios.

 

[echoecho]

is BIOS battery dieing/dead?

 

[tekola]

No reason to think the battery is dead. Time being kept, hardware configuration is being kept.

 

[ceh4702]

Stuff Wears Out you know??

Of course there are virus's that hide in the boot sector.

A Hard Drive can wear out eventually. I have seen a bad Fat Table before. In my case I made a complete recovery and it kept on going. I had a program I Downloaded from Maxtor that could save the Boot Sector with the fat table, called EZMAX or EZDRIVE. Basically when it went bad Windows took the copy of my fat table and rebuilt the fat table on the fly. My Computer never repeated this process.

Some of these programs that let you use a large drive with a BIOS that is a little old can make a drive appear to have a damaged boot sector also. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[cheekonator2]

I'm not sure, but I think all companies have diagnostics utilities that you can dl at their site. You should try that. Also you said fdisk forces to reformat. I've never really seen that, but you could try to erase and make a new partition and then format it.

 

[tekola]

Fdisk reports write-protect error and Primary DOS partition cannot be created. Manufacturer (Seagate) utility cannot write zeroes to drive. I think the drive is toast! Thanks anyway.