Hard drive corruption?
 

Hi, ,a friend of mine has a hard drive problem... Partition magic says the drive is partitioned using wrong drive geometry, and refuses to do anythign with the drive.. so I pluged the drive into my machine, used western digital tool to repartition and reformat it (it's a WD 40Gb drive) and then opened it with partition magic, and it said the same thing... So then I opened it with various fdisk programs and some didnt show a problem, others said partitons were overlapping, so I sorta edited it until they showd no problems by having free spacecs between partitions. Then when I loaded up Knoppix, QTparted did not want to shwo the partition for the drive, and when we installed linuix and windows on the drive, linux wouldn't boot, etc....

So basically, thigns are screwed up even after I repartitioned the drive using my machine.

What should we do about it?

Thanks,
RMSe17

"So basically, thigns are screwed up even after I repartitioned the drive using my machine.

What should we do about it?"

I think that you should start over with a low level format. The Western Digital utility program should be able to do that. A low level format on a 40G drive probably will take 3 or 4 hours. It will assign any bad blocks to spare blocks. If there are more bad blocks than spare blocks then the drive is probably useless.

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Steve Stites