Bad Old Maxtor!!! Help!!!

[lawrence171]

Hi! I own a MAXTOR 2.5 GB HD. Sadly, right now, bad sectors make my system hang/freeze. I have re-FDISKed it, and re-FORMATED it. And I have used Scandisk (DOS) to make all the bad or unreliable sector. Then, I tried re-installing WINDOWS 95 OSR2, during the installation somewhere, it freezed again, so I re-formatted my HD and attempt to install win 95 again, same thing happened.

I also, tried re-formating and re-FDISK the drive, same thing still happened, tried running scandisk again and again, maked all the bad sector..... still, same thing happened.

Now, two questions:
1) how the feak in the world can I make my system to stop trying to recover the bad sectors during the formatting process.
2) What should I do to get my system up and running again.

[Louie]

Try buying a new harddrive you tard!

[petemcevoy]

Personally, i think you should pay a visit to http://www.dabs.com and treat yourself to a new hard drive, going by previous experiences - messing about with a hard disk in its death throes is an exercise in futility.
If thats completely out of the question, have a look at this - http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/case8.html

[stflook]

In my opinion, it's not worth fighting (assuming it's even fixable). Just go out and get a new hard drive. They're pretty cheap right now anyway. All hard drives are destined to fail some day. If yours is only a 2.5 gig, I would assume it's old and very used. It could last another 5 years, but it could also last another 5 minutes (assuming it's fixable right now) You would want to replace it before it dies.

[chsh]

Lawrence, it sounds like you need to do a low-level format. I'm not 100% sure about it, but I know this fixed bad sectors on older drives.

Your drive manufacturer should have a low level format utility for download from their site. Just make sure you get the correct one, otherwise you could irrevocably damage the drive.

Louie does have a good point though, drive space is so inexpensive now that for $100 you can get a good quality 20GB+ drive, which will give you a lot more space than what you have now.

[RED FRACTION]

Start up with a boot disk then format through the set up of windows. I also have a Maxtor HD and had to format it through this method. so hope that helped a bit

[madhatt3r]

Your shining light into a black whole. Kick the hard drive out the window and piss on it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Then buy a new one.

[lawrence171]

In case you haven't noticed, this older computers can't use today's HDs. The BIOS and the mainboard doesn't support huge HDs like 30 GB. I can't find a 13 GB anymore. MaxBlast and stuff like that don't work on my system! IF my systme were to support larger HD, I would thorugh it out of the window.

Um..... I also tried using the WIN setup to format the HD, but didn't work.

Thanks for the link.... I'm looking for my stupid drive's model..... (dame HD!!!!)

[gaxprels]

It may be the Windows CD is bad. Test your harddrive with a different OS. Try installing Linux on it and see if it gives you any problems, (or windows from a different CD). I had a friend that had a similar problem and it turned out to be the CD, not the HD. Hope this helps. Good luck.

Happy Hacking

[stflook]

Lawrence: Are you sure? Maybe you just formatted with the FAT16 file system and assumed it couldn't support a large drive? I have never heard of an old computer not supporting a newer drive.