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Help! WinXP can't tell that my 2nd hard drive is already formatted
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 .

There may still be hope...My fix to WinME Problems
Drive image pro is the pertinent clue here, in other words you have used third party software. Exactly. (That was going to be my next question after the NTFS question.) I agree with BoB's advice. Back to basics. Start from scratch, write zeros to the boot sector first, then fdisk. Use only fdisk to set up a drive,

Formatting second disk
You should go to the Hitachi Site and get the drive utility to write Zeros to the entire drive. This will allow you to get rid of the overlay program. Any advice that would involve me keeping all my data? The drive is nearly full of stuff I value very highly, and I have no reason to believe it is truly faulty.

Win98 Install Problems
... to your drives (choose write zeros to hard drive) THIS WILL DESTROY ALL DATA ON YOUR HARD DRIVE AND WILL NOT BE ABLE TO BE RECOVERED BY ANTHING so make sure that is what you want to do. then install xp don't even creat a partition boot from the cd and let it do it all Windsword What an amazing piece of advice,

BIOS message: primary IDE channel no 80 conductor cable installed
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 My questions are: what is the difference between fdisk and format? Do I have to perform both on my hard drive? If yes, in what order? Thanks for any advice, Shelli.

Info-IBMPC Digest V91 #11
If not, and the so-called hard drive test was GWSCAN or SCANDISK run under Windows, I would have to disagree strongly with the advice given. 29 Oct 2004 22:51:50 -0500, "Jeff S." <jeffreys1...@yahoo.com> wrote: I would start with a clean slate -- using the gwcan utility, write zeros to the drive.

Boot sector keeps vanishing !
Should have done a dir to check that it was the Fujitsu instead I formatted my 40Gb hard drive and lost everything since I backed it up a month ago. I tried your suggestion Hank and /mbr didn't restore the full 4.3 though it should have. And James, it's strange trying to write zeros the programme informed me that

QUANTUM VIKING 4.5 GIG GIVES ONLY 3.89 GIG RIGHT????
Network drive maybe..) to GHOST your entire system... then.. Before redoing things from scratch - get a disk diagnostics diskette/cd image from the hard drive manufacturers web site and test it - then wipe it (write zeros to it, low-level format - whatever options they give you to obliterate it at a lower level

Hard-Drive Partitioning Woes
Anybody have any advice? I would really appreciate some help in this kind of situation. 640*480 is doing murder on my eyes. Run that, most likely from the boot diskette it makes, and do all tests that are not data destructive (ie avoid "write zeros to drive" or other destructive tests).

>>KAK Worm ...Here's the fix<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
I'd appreciate any advice on this. 1) Low level formatting is key. And realize that what you're doing is almost always NOT low-level formatting (which can only be done at the factory), but merely writing zeros to all bits. Spend the 24 hours doing it now. More problems have resulted from failing to do this than

Fdisk results
Probably won't work, but then get serious and write zero's to the mbr and embr where nt stored it's partition table. www.terabyteunlimited.com Get mbrwork , thank goodness nt doesn't screw the whole drive up, for a total rebuild go to drive manufactures for utility to write zeros to the whole drive.

Partition Magic Stumps Linux Newbie.
7 monitors, everything replaced but the floppy, 3 new hard drives, they replaced the system with a new, better one...2 more monitors and a hard drive. tells me 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.

Error writing FAT
BoB rbrtp...@SPAMatt.net microsoft public win98 setup microsoft public windowsnt setup For a true clean hard drive, download the appropriate utility from the drive manufacturer and write zeros to the drive. That's the ultimate cleaning. Any advice, or tips on troubleshooting, greatly appreciated. Thanks, Darienne.

Acronis Trueimage:sector read fails
*sigh* Anybody have any advice? I would really appreciate some help in this kind of situation. 640*480 is doing murder on my eyes. Run that, most likely from the boot diskette it makes, and do all tests that are not data destructive (ie avoid "write zeros to drive" or other destructive tests).

Advice Needed
1) To really erase your drive you need a utility that will write zeros to every sector on the drive. Find out what kind of hard drive you have and go to the mfgs website to get a I've never formatted a harddrive before so just looking for some advice on how to do it Hi... Firstly, you'll need yourRESCUE DISK,

Disk Compression Utility?
Cheers, The North Thanks for all your advice everyone - I think I should have read Andy (The North)'s message a little more carefully before I started, Bad move - this is taking ages... and ages... so I Force Quit out of Drive Setup, run Drive Setup again without the "write zero" option and this time it hangs.

How I screwed up my computer.
But I did not want to reformat the drive. If you do make the change, they always suggest that you "write zeros" to the drive first using wddiag.exe from their site. Also the responses to my postings to this news group and also to comp.arch.storage yielded conflicting advice. One person e-mailed me to say,

troll victim desperately needs help!
James H. Gilbert too...@home.com alt computer alt sys pc-clone gateway2000 SHAWN WINGET wrote: Yes, use gwscan to write zeros to the drive before you send it back. "Brian" <106651.3...@nojunk.compuserve.com> wrote in message news:96312f$99k$1@news1.skynet.be... You are right about bad sectors. Further to advice

Need a little advice
I buy Western Digital (they provide some low-level tools), so I can do a "write zeros" as well, just to make sure the boot sector is wiped. [snip] Are there actually I run XP an I can write whatever I want to the mbr, I don't even get a warning or something like that. That depends on how you "open" the drive.

bad sector recovery
You are right, there is no need to write zeros to the first 128 sectors on the drive in order to restart afresh. Need? NO. Is 128 enough to make a difference when We could help only few of the unfortunate readers that used ZAP on your advice, and discovered after the fact that they screwed up the wrong drive.