Hard Drive about to go out the window.

[Reapper]

Hello to all. I've got a problem that I can't figure out. I few days ago I woke up to my computer trying to reboot. I figured power or something got messed up in the night and it hung up on the CD that was in the drive. SO I take out the CD and reboot. Hangs up at the same place. So after trying to get into windows without any progress I pop in my boot disk and go to dos. Look at C drive and it's all gibberish. Try everything I could to save the info but no good. So I format and reinstall windows. I get things up and running almost have all my drivers and starting to download programs I lost. But it crashes agian says something about dumping physical memory then reboots. Run scan disk get a few error go into windows get almost all the way in and it does it agian. Repeat the process 2 or 3 times. SO I format and reinstall again. This time I barely get past installing a MoBo Drivers, Firewall, and virus scanner when it get a differnet error but now it won't go into windows at all and says something about not being able to find DLL files. So I format agian. This is where it sits, Blank. I do have it partitioned off and managed to save a few files on there.

Now for hardware I have:

Hard Drive: 200GB Western Digital w/ 8MB Cache
MoBo: Asus A7n8x Deluxe
Video: Asus V9280TD GF4 TI4200 128MB 8XAGP
Memory: DDR Kingmax PC 2700 2x256 chips
Sound: On board and Santa Cruz Card
CPU: AMD 1800+ (Still waiting on my 3000+ and cooling)

If anyone has any clue as to whats going on please help me. If you have any questions please ask. I so want to get this damn thing fixed. I have put way to much money into it to see it be a flying brick from the 4th floor. Thank you for any help anyone can give me.

Laterz,
William Grimmer

[Tweaked!]

Can you boot into dos and run chkdsk?

[Reapper]

Yes I can with the boot disk. That is what I have been doing. The problem is once I get windows running. Thanks for the help.

Laterz
William Grimmer

[sjohnson]

Have you downloaded and run WD's Data Lifeguard diagnostics? If not, get it at http://support.wdc.com/download/dlg/dlginstall_10_0.exe

[Reapper]

No I didn't know about that program. Thanx for the help.

Laterz,
William Grimmer

[Ruantic]

Can't say for sure, but sounds exactly like the last WD drive I had before it died....

[Reapper]

Ok I think I got the original problem fix but at the cost of half my $300 drive. I thought maybe the partition had something to do with it. So I fdisked the partition away but now that I have windows loaded agian I only have the space of what the main partition was. Any clue as to how I can get back the other half of my drive? Thank you all for your help.

Laterz
William Grimmer

[JBELL]

run fdisk or better yet get any linux distro install and kill the partitions completely and start a new.. I had similar problems and I ended up needing linux in the end to fix microsoft...

[TheDude]

The software that sjohnson linked should allow you to recover your drive. I would run the diagnostics....it has fixed several WD drives for me and if not...RMA if still under warranty.

[Reapper]

Cool the WD software got everything back. Reinstalling everything. Should run right. Anyone know how to do damn partitions so it don't crash your computer? I used Partition Magic when I did it the first time and it worked fine till I started putting stuff on it. Thanx for all the help.

Laterz,
William Grimmer

[TheDude]

I usually set my partitions thru the OS upon install. :D

[Niven]

To create one partition that fills the drive using FDISK:

Boot to DOS.

Run FDisk.

View the partitions to get an idea of how the drive currently stands.

Delete ALL partitions, you will need to do them one at a time using the different options.

It wont hurt to just use all the delete partitions one after each other, just to make sure they are all gone.

Create one primary partition using all available space.

Reboot to DOS

Format the drive

Done :D

To create more than one partition, first delete all the present partitions.

Then create the primary partition as a percentae of total drive space.

Then create a logical partition using the remaining space.

Check before formatting to see if you did it correctly.