hard Drive Help

[girovend]

I've got a 20gig h/d thats got a major fault
within the first 2 gig,which makes it impossible
to install an operating system,

does anybody know of anyway where I could
partition the first 2 gig and then hide it so that I could
make the remainder of the h/d the c drive

[jroc]

Do a Low Level Format...this should correct any errors fix the harddrive...or use Spinrite...sounds like corrupt data sectors

[girovend]

Did format it ,
it gets to just over a gig then it seems to tick over
for ages before continuing to format,

then i load in operating system (and everything else) and everythings fine untill
the bad sector is reached and system crashes

dont think it can be fixed thats why I'm trying to hide it

[BeeWatch]

Hi !
I like the Media Tools program by ACR. This program kills the logical bad sectors. If the HDD has the first 2 gig bad; you separate it with FDISK, and then don't format it. (Sorry, if I don't understand you. My english not too good.)

[girovend]

thats exactly what I thought Beewatch, I used fdisk to seperate
then made the rest of the h/drive (D) the active partition
loaded in a Ghost image of another H/drive
but couldn't get past the boot up screen

Whats this Media Tools program by ACR you speak of is it any good and where can I get it ?

[ipdave]

You should first try a lo-level format (special program for your manufacturer's drive - example: MaxDiags for Maxtor). This remaps bad sectors out of use, something that a normal format from DOS or even Win(2k/XP) cannot do. This fixes the underlying format for the format command.

[LTR12101B]

Would anything complain if you used FDISK to create a dummy partition (such as putting an EXTENDED partition first) and then the real partition second and made active?

And if DOS Fdisk can't do it, a suitable LINUX one might - with the option, possibly, to create an undefined partition, or a Linux swap that would be safe so long as you didn't actually install linux or use the CD version that detects any available swap.

[girovend]

Firstly thanx for the help

I've tried some the suggestions above but still no joy.
When I run scandisk the bad sector is still there ,whats annoying
is once scandisk marks the sector as bad then windows should not write to it, but in this case it stiil does which means I'm going to get a systems crash,dont know why it does that.
i like beewatch's idea about killing the bad sector but acr media tools is a bit pricey
but it looks like the only option, is there any other programs out
there that would kill the bad sector

[ipdave]

What kind of HD? (who makes it) .. Get their Lo-level format program (free) from their site - hi-level format (DOS/Linux) will NOT do it. Trust me. Been doing this since 1989..

[girovend]

Well IPDAVE It's a seagate barracuda 20gig h/g
and I did as you said and d/loaded the software and
partitioned and formatted the drive and everything went as planned,
But I'm not sure about what happened next,ran scandisk
from dos to check if I had fixed it and it complained that it had found 2 fat 32 tables (or something like that) and asked if I wanted to replace table one with table 2 as there were less errors on table one, I opted to go with one (thinking at the time I might be deleting what I had just done)but wasn't sure,
possibly where I went wrong,
hope that makes sense

[ipdave]

Yes, there is a 2nd backup copy of the FAT Table on many Windows OS' drives (you are using Win98?). I would try lo-level formatting only with the Seagate Utility, then formatting the drive at high level with DOS format. If the FAT table is corrupt, sectors could be marked good that are bad and vise-versa.

[girovend]

IPDAVE

Tried what you said and the probs still there,
the only option left I haven't tried is to zero fill
the drive,
do you think that it could make a difference ?

[scarecrow]

A zerofill looks like your last resort. Use the dedicated HD vendor application. It will need about 3 hours for a 20G drive.

[LTR12101B]

A friend reckoned that the Seagate drives MAY automatically revector bad sectors during zero-fill (in has case, a Linux-based raw zerofill resolved some problems)

The other approach is still to try to shift the satart of the used partition, by placing a dummy one first

http://www.ranish.com/part/
I believe this has a partioning capability with more control than FDISK.

[girovend]

I'll try the zero fill first,one question though
low level format
dos format
zero fill
Do I do all three and if so what order

and LTR12101b
I d/loaded the ranish partition manager and if the zero fill
doesnt work I'll give it a go,the thing is as soon as you create
your first partition , it is always assigned the letter C
How does this program work
I mean does it allow you you create a partition with no
drive letter so it is not recognised, it's a bit confusing
could you describe what to do
Btw i'm putting windows 98 on the disk (dont know if that
makes any difference)