hard drive or controller?

[r.stiltskin]

I'm trying to "restore" a Dell Inspiron 8000 that has a few problems. The immediate one is that I can't reinstall Windows because I can't format the hard disk. I've tried using the Windows XP install CD, and finally gave up on that & tried a Windows 98 Startup floppy. I'm only trying to format a 6 GB partition right now, but it gets to a little over 40% of that and then slows down to a crawl. The XP formatter doesn't give any error messages; it just slows down till it's making barely any progress. The Win98 formatter keeps giving the message "trying to recover allocation unit" every few clusters (after the first 40% or so).

I even tried setting up an 8mb boot partition, followed by two 6gb partitions, skipped the first 6gb & tried to format the second 6gb partition instead. Even there, it went OK till it got to about 40% & then slowed to a crawl.

I suspect that the problem is with the controller rather than the drive because this drive has been replaced once already (about 2 years ago). But of course we may just have been unlucky with the drive. It's a 20gb Toshiba drive, by the way.

Does this sound like the symptoms of a bad controller?

So which should I try replacing first: the motherboard or the hard disk? Is there any test I can do beforehand, or do I just pick one & hope for the best? Motherboards are available for not too much over $100; hard drives are just a little less.

[Jarhed7276]

Try wiping the drive with Killdisk from www.killdisk.com then partition and format the drive.

[jokostel]

id go with the controller personally... but first, try formatting the drive in another computer then try running the install again...

[jrsweger]

For the price of a harddrive, I'd go that route. Even if you get the same results, when you get the new motherboard, you still have a useable backup drive. Personally though I think the problem is the drive not the controller.

[r.stiltskin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jarhed7276

Try wiping the drive with Killdisk from www.killdisk.com then partition and format the drive.

Wow! Thanks a lot!

I must confess I was skeptical, but I figured it was worth a try. Well, after I zapped the entire disk with the free version of Killdisk, I was able to create a partition, format it (using the XP installer), and install XP with no problems, and it seems to be working perfectly!

Great find. Everyone needs to know about this program.

But ... I'm wondering why this was able to succeed where ordinary formatting could not. Do you know why this worked?

[skeltonjoe]

yea most of the time killdisk does the trick because theres something that hang up the pc on your hard drive that wont let you format it

[Jarhed7276]

Killdisk will zero fill the drive so that the only thing on the drive is nothing (zeros).
Formatting leaves the old data on the drive only writing new partition information. Sometimes the old data bleeds through causing conflicts with the newly installed data. Someone may be able to give you a more technical explanation but that's a simple explanation.