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Master Boot Record Changed
... with xp pro installed. there was a problem and they had me "write zeros to the drive" and reinstall xp. before this i had installed a second hard drive (f) to this is normal xp behavior but its a waste of space on f. can i write zeros to f, unplug it, write zeros to c and start all over? any advice appreciated.

Cloncking HDD
All modern hard drives just write zeros thru all the sectors. Waste of time doing that with a new drive. If you want to be a fanatic, This is probably obsolete advice, No probably about it, completely obsolete. unnecessary with today's modern drives, but the logic from the old days still seems to make sense.

Cloncking HDD
g_ball...@adobeforums.com adobe photoshop macintosh I'll third the ZERO WRITE advice. The only way you can rule out the drive for Bad Blocks (which may cause -36 error) is to Initialize with Zero Write option checked... <http://www.gballard.net/macrant/initialize.html> If Drive SetUp (or Disk Utility) won't let you

Re-format an NT disk to install W98SE
You don't have 2 Meg in bad sectors, you have 2 Gig in bad sectors, definitely physical damage on the drive. Getting a new drive from Gateway will be no problem if you run GWSCAN, write zeros to the drive and errors show up in GWSCAN after that. That does mean everything on the drive is lost though.

disk error -36
I also was considering running a program that compares like files to eliminate duplicates and when everything is complete I was going to use the Western Digital site to "write zeros" to this drive so I can have a clean drive to start from. Any advice offered would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, jeff .

Hard drives and Windows XP
Western Digital do a disk that can write zeros to the whole drive.Doing this ensures you have an absolutely "virgin" disk to start from. Any advice as to what I can do to get the machine to recognize a boot disk so I can install Windows? Thanks in advance. -- Remove the NOSPAM from the e-mail address to reply.

Copy Drive to Drive
It says 33.8gb when I write zeros to it with gwscan program. Is this some kind of magic number? 32 binary GB. The West Digital utilities show it as 40gb then with a true 40gb capacity Right, that is the real test and proof. and was made in Thailand Thanks for any advice on how to make this into a 40gb drive.

G4 Won't stay off?
-Vaughn Bad Advice! It is almost imposible to damage an IDE hard drive made after 1992 or so with the "low level format" programs found on drive manufacturers sites. These utilities don't truly do a low level format; that is write track and sector info to the disk. They just write zeros to all the data sectors on

Is this a virus? Nasty enough to be...
Rock, thanks for your advice. If I install the problem drive as a slave drive, I think I need to change the jumper setting of the problem drive, do I need to have the Rock Wrote: Install the problem drive as a slave drive, get the drive manufacturer's utility from their web site and write zeros to the drive.

psd disk error on save
On the EZ-drive disk should be a program called WD_DIAG.exe (or something close). This is the program to use to write zeros to the drive and perform diagnostics, I think I also followed the procedures some of the others have talked about concerning partitioning/formating procedures and provided advice on

WTB -4 IDE Hard Drives +Advice
I just had to do a major clean up...had to write zeros to my hard drive. Never realized how much stuff had accumulated until I lost it ! I could not give him advice, as everyone can tell I am computer challenged!! I am having trouble with my ISP, some of the posts I don't get until someone replies to the

Need advice re PC Privacy
Alyson alys...@acedsl.com microsoft public windowsxp perform_maintain i have been tracking your advice on your wonderful site. i hope somehow you get to see this I was forced to 'write zeros' to the drive and here i am at that step right now. Any other info you can provide in hindsight (so I can give it back to

MBR problem !!!!!!!!!!
I downloaded a utility program from my hard drive's manufacturer (Quantum) that will write zeros to the entire drive. They then note that the drive Do I have to perform both on my hard drive? If yes, in what order? Thanks for any advice, Shelli Fdisk will partition and activate the boot partition on the drive.

Mysterious Hard Drive Problem
Problem was, it was offered as a general, cure-all advice. Perhaps you'd understand why that rankles when you consider what happened to a client of mine. .... It writes zeros to the drive, leaving absolutely no data. Then I reinstalled WinME. Question: Did your HD use any MBR code, perhaps as a BIOS workaround?

Help Writing Zeros
Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools If you still want to dump XP and don't have the CD well first off ignore the advice to get a "0" writer. You would need to download it from your specific Hard Drive manufacturer. It will write zeros all over the Hard Drive. It is both time consuming and highly likely

Corrupt boot area
By writing zeros in the free space, a restore is almost impossible. (The Harddrive-manufacturers actually can restore a HD after low-formatting a hard drive up to 8 times...) Digi -- DigiTalk, Admin of Winamp Discussion List, Webmaster of www.winamp-faq.de "scGram" <dori...@writeme.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag

Gateway 700XL Challange
He came to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage for some simple advice. Apparently he did not trust his own information. I ask questions, when people present Sure, the drive can interpret the "format track" ATA command byte to mean "write zeros to the user data sectors in that track", but that is far from a

WTB -4 IDE Hard Drives +Advice
But it won't boot up when I make it the master drive. How can I make it work Linda . With datalifeguard you need to disconnect the source (xp) drive before running the tools. The tools detect xp as pre nt 4 (8gb partition). Wipe thenew drive using their diags - write zeros to drive (full) once xp drive is

Advice needed
Does anyone think the drive is bad...I'm seriously thining about sending it back, ASAP , I'm thinking...any advice PLEASE Another thing that might help is to do a 'psudo' low level format that several SCS BIOS offer. This will write zeros to all sectors that the drive can access, and will not affect any bad sector

NTFS Formatted Hard Drive
So, I decided to boldly "Write Zeros to Drive". It was writing fine until it was about 75% complete, which was probably where the 980665 cluster was, I do believe Blanton's advice to do a backup is best, then. I suppose Pasquale should run one of the low-level hard drive testers, either downloaded from the