HardDrive problems! (Can't format)

Ok, I think I got a virus or something and one of my harddrives (the quantum 20gig) somehow got corrupted. I was forced to install windows xp on my second smaller (10 gig) harddrive as the other one would not boot anymore. Anyways, now that i'm back in windows, the OS recognizes the corrupt harddrive and Disk Manager states it as being "Healthy and Active" however I can't access it as it says it's not formated. If I try to format it, says that format failed. I also tried booting from the xp cd and formating from there and the same thing. I then tried to format from command prompt and got something like:

First NTFS boot sector is unwritable
All NTFS boot sectors unwritable
Format Failed

however the harddrive is RAW in its current state. Is there anything I can do to fix this? From what I read, I need to somehow fix my boot sector, is this right?

Thanks.

When I usually format a drive through fdsik utility, I "format"
the master boot record first before formatting. Try doing a
google search on mbr or master boot record for more info. To
invoke it I go from the A drive of a boot disk with the fdisk utility
on it: fdisk.exe /mbr. That should reset the mbr, but I am not 100%
sure it is what you need. So search on it before trying it.

HTH

i ran fdisk last night, and created a primary DOS and an extended DOS partition on a 120 g drive, with each partition being about 60 gigs. the utility didn't have enough room to display the length of the drive, so the first time, i read 11477, and made a partition 5570, then realized that it was only 5% of the drive.
Did it again, and made it 55740, and it came up right.

i used a version of fdisk that came on a Ecomputer installation CD.

EDIT: Today, we re-installed ME off of the CD's and it Ghosted the image back onto the hard drive. Guess what? It killed the D: drive! When I went into FDISK again, the C: drive was 120g, and there was no extended partition!
Go Figure...
If she wants to really do it, then I'll give her my old ME CD.
She was going to use XP on the D: drive, but ME for her old games.

I have a 160GB drive. I was able to create 2 primary Fat32 partitions with partition magic 5.0, although each partition could be no larger than 64GB.

The total drive size reported by the BIOS is only 136GB.

To get the maximum GB out of the drive, I would have to let WinNT (XP) create the drive partitions, and then it gives me around 160GB of NTFS partitions.

the format command says it's formatting 49g for the 160g drive. We did it again tonight, as she wanted to start fresh, to ensure that no viruses were attracted in the past few days of no AV software installed, and the kids were surfing.

I have always used Linux FDISK successfully to partition my disks. I happen to have a handy automatically starting install cd which has a possibility to run FDISK before any real installing happens. So I use it ;)

It is a bit complicated for a first timer, need to notice a lot of things (such as remember to set active partition!), but if you're familiar with partitioning a disk, there should be no big problems.

Anyways, it is the only Linux program I use regularly. Especially handy if you need to make NTFS formatted disk a FAT32 disk so you can install older Windows.

I got PM 5.0 to fit on a single bootable floppy. It's very nice, mouse, GUI... many FS supported.

I've found that fDisc is ok for partitioning ur hdd, however Partition Magic is the best program to use. Loads of tools n also lots of help.

Oh n the original problem, ur hdd seems like u need to reset the mbr (Master Boot Record). Very simple to do!! Type Fdisk.exe/mbr

If you need any help just ask!!

:wave:

Hopefully u got the problem sorted