Hard Drive Corruption Problems

edited April 2005 in Hardware
On this compaq i bought for $40 at a garage sale, i decided i'd reformat the hard disk so it is really my computer, that isnt flodded with crap i dont want.

This however, was a severe mistake. I still seem to be kinda n00bish, but i know more than my whole family does about computers.

my first mistake was not decompressing this drive before formatting. so, when i try to install windows, i get this problem about no hard disk found.

great. so, i use fdisk to create the C:\ drive. that was yet another mistake because now because i formatted while compressed, i have ruined the file structure of the drive. namley, win95 setup says i need to remove ntfs or hpfs. that could be a problem because it was compressed with fat32. so, i attempt to use dblspace to the hard drive. it says i need to move the application to the C:\ dirve, so i go back to the prompt, and something bad happens. "Invaild media type reading drive C:\" Abort, Retry or Fail. so, i i keep pressing rety for about 10 minutes until i gave up.

so, i decide to go down to computer surplus (my local computer store) and buy a hard drive. sounds easy enough... i bought a 2.5gb caviar hd and go back home to install the drive. i open up the case, and take out the HD shelf and unplug everything. plug in the HD and it starts up, and so i use fdisk to create C:\

so i do that, and then i insert the windows 95 cd into the banana. (haha.. banana cd-rom drive.) and i type

cd\win95

i get a prompt that says

R:\win95\>

so i type setup.

everything going smoothly until setup runs the disk checker.

setup found a compressed volume.

now, the guy up there said it was not compressed.

so, i try moving dblspace to the drive.

here is what i get:

Invaild media type reading drive C:\
Abort, Retry or Fail?

i press f and go watch inuyasha to ponder over this.

so 2 days later i take it back in to get it repired, and now i'm telling you this story.

my guess is that because i was trying to install win95a and the HD was over 2097.8 mb, it caused a malfunction.

if you don't think so, post your hypothesis, please, and tell me wether you think there is a way to save it.

Comments

  • OK, the best thing to do, since you didn't want what was on the drive in the 1st place is to completely departition the drive, recycle, and partition using a Wi98 bootdisk (They're my favourites).

    -Q

    PS. If you have another HDD it might not be a bad idea to stick that thing in and see if it's operable (Provded the steps above don't help).
  • fdisk /mbr
    then run fdisk again.
    then format again.
  • Well, That computer is now my nice little abandonputer, i have tons of abandonware and win98 se.

    Thanks for the help.

    Now i need to find that AOL cd to put in the banana.
  • Reminds me of a PC I came acorss that had GoBack on it. A friend of mine bought a second hand PC from a yardsale and he went and bought some newhardware to spice it up a bit. Well some how he fuccked uo 98 so it would frezze after 2 minutes. He already copyed his old files to the drive and gave reformated the old drive from his old PC so I couldn't reformat. Anyway, I reinstalled windows by deleting the WIN.COM file and the Win98 setup didn't like the filesystem. Yet it was FAT32. Come to find out it had GoBack installed and GoBack basicly puts the harddrive into a file image that GoBack opens durring startup. After countless hours of trying to find a way to bypass it I used my KOPPIX Linux Live CD and mounted the drive and copyed all of his files over to my laptop via ethernet and reformated his harddrive. The lesson I have learned was never start trinking with a harddrive that god knows whats on it before you do a standard reboot etc etc etc.. I skiped ahead and just poped in a bootdisk and started reinstalling windows with out checking what was instored. Yet this brings me back when people would be confused on how to remove a NTFS off of a harddrive back in the day and how to remove a comprestion off of a drive. MS-Fdisk is the all cure all lol. I havn't came across a filesystem that FDISK can't remove.
  • TCPMeta wrote:
    I havn't came across a filesystem that FDISK can't remove.

    Try a secondary NTFS partition.

    -Q
  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • I'd download the free version of killdisk , good for wiping the drive clean
    of data & partitions, in fact if you do a search on google you may just end
    up with the full version like I did.
  • edited February 2011
    if a hdd is acting up on me i put it in a old american megatrends comp .. the bios has a low level format utillity .. i run it it pre-formats the drive .. then i use my 98 boot disk and fdisk a partion .. then go to the drive were 98 bootidsk made the ramdrive ... type format c: .. and it should make a working fat32 partion on the drive.

    simple..

    many other tools like Partion Magic.. an old dos partion manager like fdisk but with much more features

    Partion Magic
    http://www.dossolutions.pwp.blueyonder. ... pmagic.zip

    enjoy..
    ________
    Zx14 vs hayabusa
  • Using PTEDIT.EXE from the Partition Magic boot disks to zero the partition table might work.
  • Once you Fdisk and remove partitons... it should work fine. Of course you might want to make a new partition after deleting any old ones, then format it. Sometimes it's easier to do all of that from a bootdisk, then install windows. Or if you have an NT based version use it's partition part of the setup, it works great.
  • fixed disk not found
    tihs is my problem
  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • pretty much... on my old 486, when it's hdd crashed i got a "Hard disk read failure" or something to that effect......
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