"BAD" HDD

[Anonymous]

I have some linux partitions on my old 30GbWD hdd, but i cannot reformat it with partition magic! It says i have a bad hard drive and labels it BAD and doesn't have ANY parttions at ALL!!!!! Anyone can help??

[NeoGen]

I use Partition Magic too and have never seen such error message. Could it be that your hard drive has some bad sectors?
If you can, get some program on the internet to scan the hard drive for bad sectors. I used to make scans for bad sectors when I had windows 98 and ran the old scandisk many years ago. lol. Hours and hours running it and (fortunately) never found anything wrong... Those were the days... hehe
Nowadays I don't know if windws xp has any program for that. If I do remember well yet, if you format a hard drive on pure dos, and a long one, not a quick format, it will give you the amout of free space, a couple more things and if there's any, then it shows the space lost for bad sectors.

Anyways, I really hope your problem is just some glitch with Partition Magic and that if you uninstall and reinstall it, it will be ok... :wink:

[Bionic_Redneck]

I think Neogen is on the right track with dos but run fdisk and remove all non dos partitions makes more since from my perspective then make new partitons and format. if that doesn't work you may have to use the linux version of fdisk to delete the partitions.

[Anonymous]

mmmmm, i fixed the problem whatever it was. Booted the mandrake set-up deleted all partitions, and put one big FAT32 on in. I restarted, windows still opnly showed 1 windows partition of 10GB so i opened partition magic and formatted the drive to NTFS and i restared aand now i have 28.6GB of data :D(free)

Thanks for all ya'lls help!!