On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 09:39, you wrote: > I have a 13Gb Hard drive which is probably stuffed but I thought I would > ask the list for advice before I biff it. > > First symptom was that it did not want to coexist with my other HD on my > new MOBO. > I managed to put it into another box and boot into Gentoo Live CD and scp > the files I needed to keep to my new hardware so nothing is lost. > > I planned to fit the drive into one of my sons' boxes but we had the > "coexistence" problem. > Tried using Gentoo Live-cd - cfdisk to remove partitions then create a > fat32 partition and did not get any errors. > Win 98 startup disk would not let us create partition > > Did a "low-level format" but still cannot create partition from ms-dos or > windows. > > Any ideas? Sell me the disk :-) Seriously though, what did you do to "low-level format"?
I'd try zeroing out the first few sectors of the disk. This will overwrite the partition table and the master boot record. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdx count=16 bs=512 Of course to do the job ( a true "low-level format" ) properly you can erase everything on the disk by making count equal to the number of cylinders and bs equal to the number of sectors per cylinder multiplied by 512 -- Sincerely etc., Christopher Sawtell
