Hard Drive problems, not NEC

[Richard_Cranium72]

ON yet another junk I have a Maxtor 1.6.

I tried to make it work in my bare bones 400 amd machine.

The HD refused to fdisk.
It did scandisk OK.
It did format OK.
OK, so I put it in the HP and use the format option in there and also the scandisk.

Then used the "wipe" program.
At 19 min left in wipe, I get disk write error, try again this time at 16 min, again at 14 min, twice.

If the disk is faulty why don't bad sectors show up in the other steps?

[Nathan]

For some strange reason fdisk doesn't work with all operating systems. Sometimes I have to use a 98, 95, or even a MS-Dos 6.X setup disk to drop the partitions. Not sure why this happens either.

[Richard_Cranium72]

Thanks for the reply old Wise One.

The lofty Heavens have opened up yet again and have bestowed the wisdom of ages upon us poor mortals. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

Is it possible for a virus to infect two hard drives, maybe three, and make them unusable?

I got a weird e-mail and since then I've been losing HD's by the day.

They won't accept the low level that the wipe does, nor fdisk.

thanks
DrVette

[severen]

well,,I have heard of a certain virus that does do that,,it's called "Electro-Static-Discharge". And this virus can infect any hard disk thats handled wrong or not properly installed.

Be very careful,,this virus does perm damage!

[Richard_Cranium72]

Not trying to sound smart, but I'm like real OLD.

I've been doing electronics murder for several decades. However, my knowledge of pewters is at best, limited.

The infection that I've recd has spread to three HD's as best as I can tell.

In front of me is ,, err, 10 boxes, 8 are mine and 2 in for http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gifrepair.

Hopefully, I'll not infect a customer machine with whatever is happening..

DrVette

[DuhWhat]

Not to harp on the same thing in two threads... but...

Did you check to see what Maxtor drive settings are supported? Should you use LBA/Large/Normal? Don't know that this fixes anything. But with the older drives, you may want to check to make sure the bios is getting the correct setting. I might be wrong on this one, but I think the drive will let you have limited access with the wrong settings, but you won't be able to do other important stuff.

Just my 2cents worth.

[Richard_Cranium72]

Please accept my apologies for multiple posting.
Refer all future correspondence to this thread->> http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/Forum2/HTML/009141.html
The units I was working on were a HP, NEC and a bb amd 433 unit.
The issues seemed different then lead to the same problem, it seems..
Hopefully I can work through this without too much expense or time involved from the good folks at sysopt.

Most Sincerely, DrVette