hitachi hard drive in laptop will not format

[whateverscreenname]

Try as I might, I can not get this friggin' little hitachi HDD to format using fdisk or format commands in DOS.

I tried KILLDISK.exe, but it won't load. Hitachi has a utility that didn't work, and i tried a program called partita that didn't work either. (in case anyone wants to suggest any of those).

I was able to use fdisk on it at first, but after it took hours to not even come close to finishing, i rebooted. Well, I musta screwed it up somehow, because now I can't do much of anything with it. I am trying to open the case and see if I can slave it with my desktop system, etcetera, but I can't get 2 screws out, and the damn thing won't open.

This computer is a few years old, it came with win98, its a compaq presario 1200. I swear, if anyone knows what will get this thing working (and eventually bootable), I can take care of loading the OS. And then, I would be a happy man.

Thanks.

 

[CrazyNexus]

Compaq laptops from a few years ago are notorious for having their HDD's fail completely. I had many many instances of that happen when I worked at a university consulting place. I'd say I had more 'older' compaq laptop HDD's fail than any other laptop.

Might be a simple case of your HDD being kaput.

 

[aldog]

DEBUGGING A HARD DRIVE:

Try to debug the hard drive. This is typically an undocumented procedure because it is PERMANENT. The DEBUG command takes a few minutes, but it does a lot of nice little things...like destroy the partition table and reset track 0 the FAT. It destroys ALL partitions on a hrad drive, too. BE carefull!!!

I don't want to risk performing a typo, so I will give a link to the procedure....

http://www.tek-tips.com/gfaqs.cfm/lev2/66/lev3/68/pid/602/fid/1569

This is a thread from this site that explains it in every detail. Good luck!

 

[aldog]

A usefull tip about the debugging:

You MUST follow the procedure exactly as it is stated. The folks who wrote the debug command know more than you and I combined...lol.

This tool is usefull if there is a virus, or a disk-locking program preventing you from using FDISK, because you do not use fdisk to debug the hard drive, you instead use your boot disk.

Make sure your computer boots from the floppy BEFORE the hard drive, Put your boot disk in the computer, restart and select Shift F5 for command prompt if you need to. If the ms-dos says C:\, you will have to type A: (and hit enter), then type DEBUG and begin.

 

[whateverscreenname]

Thank you for your help, but the debug thing didn't work. I've taken a couple microcontroller classes and I can tell what most of those commands are doing, sorta. I made sure to type it just right. However, when I command it to fdisk, I still get the message "No fixed disks present".
I am just going to see if I can get a new HDD.