HDD giving invalid drive specification

[piyushsinghal]

I have a Samsung 2.1 GB HDD with Windows 95.

My problem started on a Pentium 1 m/c when suddenly my computer hanged and on rebooting showed Disk boot failure.On rebooting with a boot diskette The HDD is not recognised and showed up invalid drive specification and no drive letter is recognised by the system.

I ported it to other m/c (Celeron ) My motherboard is autodetecting the HDD correctly (2.1 GB) . It is also Displaying all the correct settings in the CMOS setup. But again the same problem is showed (Invalid drive specification) on booting from a boot diskette .

I tried by making it primary slave or secondary master. Mother board is still recognizing it correctly.And I successfully booted from Other HDD (which is 20 GB seagate drive) to windows 98. But the HDD(2.1 GB) is still not recognised in windows even.

Any Help will be highly appreciated

 

[osuman]

Sounds to me like it probably died. Justin

Feel free to email me at:
beckham@mailbox.orst.edu

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Have you tried fdisk /mbr?

 

[edfair]

Sounds like the partition table has been corrupted. Probable solution to wipe it out and start over. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.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.

 

[Alt255]

Sometimes, this sort of problem can be solved without repartitioning or attempting to restore the Master Boot Record with FDISK /MBR (both approaches can make your data a little hard to access).

The most common cause of piyushsinghal's problem is corruption in the byte at the fourth offset in the first partition record (the OS Indicator byte). The value here must be appropriate to the OS type and version (see the table in the Microsoft KB Q69912 article). Of course, you will need a good sector editor to check or change this value.

FDISK /MBR can restore this value automatically, along with the first 446 bytes of the boot record. The MBR switch is designed to restore this portion while leaving the partition table information intact. Unfortunately, FDISK can cause more damage than good in the event of boot sector corruption. If the last two bytes of the sector are not h55 and hAA, FDISK with overwrite the boot sector with zeros, destroying all partition records (see

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q149/8/77.asp).

It is best to manually inspect the boot record prior to running FDISK /MBR. If the last two bytes are not 55AA, you should write those values so FDISK can (hopefully) restore the Master Boot Record.

Ed's suggestion of wiping everything out and starting over is practical, in many cases, but has some disadvantages (you lose all data). Sometimes it's possible to fix the problem without starting from scratch.

Related reading:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q69/0/13.ASP

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q166/4/54.ASP

Alt255@Vorpalcom.Intranets.com​

 

[edfair]

Agree with everything Alt255 says. But if the partition table is corrupted you can't get access to the boot record with anything that the normal user has available. Sector editing is fine with a drive that is attached. The problem here is that the drive isn't attaching.
And the problem can be such that fdisk can't delete the existing information. The solution in this case is the zero fill utility or the debug script.
Sounds like the time for a FAQ for the zero fill solution. How about doing it Craig? Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.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.

 

[Mudassar]

Alt255 and Edfair. Are you two challenging each other or something?

Every post I have seen with both of you responding to it, there is like some sort of competition.

You 2 have probably helped most of the people in Tek-Tips. Keep up the good work!

And as for you Ousman, that was a horrible response. -----------------
MK

Everybody should use AntiVirus! Are you protected now?

 

[edfair]

No competition. But we both feel free to expand on the other's solutions or wording or understanding of the problem. We come at problems from different points so our observations will be different. He feels the elephant legs and thinks the elephant is like a tree. I feel the trunk and think the elephant is like a fire hose.
Craig is more a professional programmer. I do hardware. He works with co-employees. I service multiple customers.

Osuman gave a polite answer. I would have no problem confirming his diagnosis. But there are steps beyond what have been tried so far.

Hard drive controller is still being recognized. So at the risk of doing further damage I would use either the zero fill program (debug script can be found in several forums) or zap (a utility from seagate). Then would try a low level format. Then fdisk then format.
Failing at any step will indicate a drive inoperative at late OS version. Next would be a primary partition with less than full use to get around possible bad sector early followed with a partition using the rest of the drive. Failure here would lead to the trash can. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.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.

 

[basweek]

Have you checked the power connection to the drive itself. I have seen loose connections cause this prolem before.