Well, that's the other option. Did you run chkdsk on it?
I was just on WIKI last night, two-ish, compiling a CD for work and I suffered two session ending crashes. Thankk the fuck gawds that my start-up routine at that moment included chkdsk.
I probably would not be posting, otherwise.
Not sure what happened, but I heard my HDD seeker re-perch and all went vertical stripes and quasi-Sierpinski looking mouse cursor. I suspected the card again, but the cursor was a give-away that it was not that this time.
I shut it all down, fourish, and ran a ""complete"" chkdsk on start up. It took six-plus hours! It was not quite done when I got home from the "meeting"
You will probably need to do a low-level format on that disk. An ordinary format won't help you with the MBR.
Are you talking about a "zero-fill" type of format, where the drive writes over and reads every address, sector, etc? If I can recall, there is a command switch in DOS that does this, too, but I haven't used DOS in so long I would need to freshen my memory of which command switches to use.
No, DOS can't do that sort of formatting. A zero-fill format most probably isn't enough.
Really? Then, I am mistaken. I thought an fdsik cmd could zerofill a disk.
Er, no. It can format a drive, but that's not the same as wiping out everything by entering random data.
I know there are troubleshooting utilities available that perform this type of formatting and initiation. I may still have the one that came with this drive, somewhere. MaxBlaster or something like that, I think it's called.
You can download MaxBlaster if you don't have it anymore. If memory serves, MaxBlaster does the kind of low-level formatting I'm talking about. There's also a Linux-based boot CD with formatting and partitioning tools out there that I have used successfully.
I found it. I have the MaxBlast CD. I gott alll the shitt for thiss hardware, updated it at work today, too.
They have tools to dx and probably low-level format the drive.
... or are you talking about a way to flash the ROM where the drive's construction and "bad sector" error record info is kept inside the hardware. I don't know how to do that.
You can't flash that ROM, AFAIK, but even if you could, it wouldn't be wise. The information there is vital to your disk.
... and if I understand, correctly, the info is unique to this particular disk. I have no idea how those determinations are made with the current run of disk technology.
The physical disk is analysed when manufactured, and its imperfections are mapped, I believe. The tools used to do this are VERY different from fdisk, cfdisk, etc, because these are essentially all high-level access mechanisms to manipulate data on disks. For one thing, the manufacturer's tools are usually not in any way bound to a certain file system, be it FAT, NTFS, ext3 or something else. They work more like BIOS tools--they deal with the physical geometry of the disk.
But I'm guessing a bit, too, because I don't have experience in manufacturing disks; instead I know the principles behind hard drives, the BIOS, etc.
