Hi folks, I have just come across an interesting one, and thought I would throw it in for comment and suggestions.

The Computer is a Dell Dimension 8100, P4/1.7Ghz, 764Mb PC800 RAMBUS, nVidia graphics 64Mb, Turtle Beach sound card. 60Gb 7,200 rpm HDD.

Running Windows ME on a FAT32 filesystem. It started to play up all of a sudden, not booting and so on. Sometimes just a black screen with the options F1 to retry and F2 to enter BIOS setup.

If you go for F1 it just repeats the message on a new line. F2 indicates that the HDD is not detected.

Booting from the Win ME rescue disk and then rebooting Windows lets me get into safe mode and run scandisk (won't complete in normal mode) but that doesn't find anything unusual, just file fragments/orphans and a couple of cross-linked files (temporay ones at that).

I got it to boot into normal mode, but it blue screens after a while and gives the enigmatic "unable to write to disk in drive C"

I took the HDD out and slaved it to my Win XP box............... that was a laugh and a half. It wasn't recognised at first so I went into setup and fixed that. It correctly identified the HDD as a slave, and got the model and specs right It also set my processor from an AMD Athlon XP 1900+ to a 1200Mz Athlon processor?......................I cannot even do that in the BIOS!!!!

When I reset the processor (it still showed as a 1900+) in the setup.........all I could do was click on the setting and accept it............the slave HDD was no longer recognised. It started to crash the XP box when I tried setting it to "auto" or to "user"

Strangely, when it lets you into "user" it won't let you set any of the values

I tried the Data Advisor 5.0 software from Ontrack and all that found were a couple of file fragments. Even after an 8 hour surface scan.

I got the Hitachi "Drive Fitness Test" and ran it in "advanced test mode" This gave me a result code of 0x73, which means "Defective device: excessive shock" which is total crap. I then ran the "quick test" which gave a code of 0x00, which means everything is hunky dory.

I ran the advanced test again and it also gave 0x00

So much for Hitachi diagnostics.

I tried the usual fixmbr ploy as well, but it didn't make any difference.

The drive is an IBM IC35L060A VER07-0 (built in May 2001), but that IS NOT the issue here

Any ideas or suggestions?



Any ideas or comments