Old hdd back to life?

[Rookie]

Hello, hardware wizards, I've got an old maxtor 7120A 124m hdd that *died* on me. I want to use it for a firewall project for my 486, (maybe put linux of it as well). From reading this board I did a low level format with Maxtors llf prog. (maxblast is for newer hdd according to Maxtor tech help)
The llf seemed to hang- didnt take 3-5 min. like the read me said it would.
I then tried fdisk/mbr and it said *disk unusable*, I tried to do the sys c:, but I read somewhere I was supposed to do- sys a: c: or something. Now it says win98 detects a non fat or fat32 partition- disk may need to be partitioned...blah, blah.
(I know 98 wont fit- just wanted to use the cd rom drivers to load 95) when I do fdisk- it says *no fixed disks present*...
Any ideas?
Thanks for putting up with me,
Rookie

[Bazango]

I'm guessing, but maybe a BIOS problem? It should be easy to rule this out. When you say *died*, should we understand what you mean? What were the symptoms of failure?

... another rookie.

[Rookie]

When it died, the error message was on post: it said- hard disk failure, insert boot disk.
When I did that it said (if I remember correctly) blah, blah, disk unusable...
At that point I thought it had gone to hdd heaven- then I read stuff here about low level formats and not making assumptions about wheather or not it was really dead.
Apparently a low level format rebuilds the master boot record- or removes it so one then can do fdisk /mbr.
I did the low level format and it said- cant read from sector one or words to that effect.
I read other threads on hdd and tried fdisk /mbr (I also read faqs from searchs on fdisk /mbr) so I tried it and now it says the disk is write protected...Do I give up now?
Or is there an attrib /h or whatver. to unwrite protect it?
Thanks for the response- my friends think its a waste of time cause the hdd is so old and small. I want the expiriance...
Rookie

[Bleep]

Whoops just went back and found my reply would not work.
Bleep

[This message has been edited by Bleep (edited 07-27-99).]