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glottisFlag for Pakistan

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Cant format my "bad sectored" hard disk

Going through my old thrown away stuff, I found my Segate 3gig HDD. I though it wont work, so broke the seal opened up and looked around in it. Then I closed it up again real nicely and thought about why not give it a try. To my surprise my win98 detected it, and showed some reall old documents, and files and stuff.

It was slow in access and some folders werent even accessible. I used the fdisk command and deleted the partition. Then when I tried to create the partition fdisk kept on checking for drive integerity for like a 100 times, so i restarted my PC. When I went back to fdisk it said the the partition is of FAT32 and 100% is used by the first logical partition. Ah well... so i exit fdisk and when I tried to format the drive, at somewhere near 85% it said that it is unable to format. I cant run scandisk or anythjing also.

So my question after this long story is that how do i recover my hard disk... Dont care about the data in it... just wnat to use the HDD again. Also how do i find how many bad sectors are there... and if possible can they be removed like by low level formatting or something.

Thanks
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CrazyOne
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dxf224

If you want to use the hard drive again, try doing this...

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~hsakr/hdspeakers/hdspeakers.htm


Opening the case on your drive has probably subjected it to infection by the airborne Dr. Kevorkian virus..... which searches your hard drive for old files and deletes them... permanently.

All kidding aside - the gap between the drive heads and platters is so small that dust particles will ruin you drive very quickly, and no software will recover it. You may be able to operate it for a little while but the damage is ongoing so try to copy off any valuable files and prepare to re-christen it as a doorstop.
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Luc Franken
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dxf224: haha... maybe I would do that.
the lovely open it to see what you can see and discover.  the drive will not last too long.  you can leave it in the system with garbage files in it and then wait for the crash/bang, etc to see what opening it caused tho .  .