hard drive quirks

[TLH1310]

One of my friends was given a P75 computer and brought it to me for assistance and I need to confirm a theory. There are 2 quirks with it:

1 it takes about 2 minutes to find and start reading the hard drive.

2 There is a mysterious D drive with nothing on it. BTW there is only 1 drive and 1 partition.

My theory is the Drive controller is going bad. (It's an on-board controller) Are there any other possibilities out there?

Thanks for your time.

T. L. Hicks

 

[edfair]

Without cleaning everything off, you can't be sure. You could have some garbage in the partition table that could cause problems like this.
Try a fdisk with 6.22 version and see if it recognises an alien filesystem.
Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[TLH1310]

Thanks for the suggestion but, as soon as I got the machine I wiped the hard drive, then re-partitioned/formatted it as the previous owner had a lot of stuff on it.

T

 

[garwain]

I'd try looking for a small app called zapdisk which deletes all partitions (in case fdisk can't see the partition for some reason)

if that doesn't do the trick go to the HDD manufacturiers website and grab the program to do a low level format of the drive.

I've seen both these methods do wonders for wierd HDD problems

 

[bgauntt]

If you need to low level format, there are instructions for doing this here: faq602-1569