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Hard drive formatting problem
I have a 120 GB Seagate Barracuda drive model ST3120026A.
I am attempting to use this drive in an external usb2 enclosure. I made a mistake with the jumper the first time I plugged it in and jumppered the pins limiting drives to 32GB. I then formatted the drive in windows SP (NTFS) while the OS was running. I soon realized my mistake.
I took the drive out of the enclosure, fixed the jumpers so the drive is now on cable select, plugged the drive directly into my motherboard on a secondary IDE channel.
I then booted the computer and tried to use partition magic to fix my error and reformatted the drive. Partition magic listed the drive format as BAD. When I clicked on properties the drive serial number was not found. So I chose to format the drive NTFS within partition magic but an error occurs.
The error is listed as
BADMBR, primary volume, 114471.0 MB on disk 4
error 4 while executing batch
error 4 bad argument/parameter
So i tired Seagate’s disk wizard to format the drive the utility did not seem to find the drive.
The weird thing is windows recognizes the drive and it can be format the drive in NTFS format. I would ultimately like to format the drive as FAT32 so it can be read on both windows machines and Macs.
Do i need to fix the MBR?
Please help!!!!
Thank you.
I am attempting to use this drive in an external usb2 enclosure. I made a mistake with the jumper the first time I plugged it in and jumppered the pins limiting drives to 32GB. I then formatted the drive in windows SP (NTFS) while the OS was running. I soon realized my mistake.
I took the drive out of the enclosure, fixed the jumpers so the drive is now on cable select, plugged the drive directly into my motherboard on a secondary IDE channel.
I then booted the computer and tried to use partition magic to fix my error and reformatted the drive. Partition magic listed the drive format as BAD. When I clicked on properties the drive serial number was not found. So I chose to format the drive NTFS within partition magic but an error occurs.
The error is listed as
BADMBR, primary volume, 114471.0 MB on disk 4
error 4 while executing batch
error 4 bad argument/parameter
So i tired Seagate’s disk wizard to format the drive the utility did not seem to find the drive.
The weird thing is windows recognizes the drive and it can be format the drive in NTFS format. I would ultimately like to format the drive as FAT32 so it can be read on both windows machines and Macs.
Do i need to fix the MBR?
Please help!!!!
Thank you.
Callandor
Instead of using cable select, did you try master or slave? If there was a problem with the master boot record, I would have expected the 32GB format to not work.
ASKER
I have tried both master and slave.
Have you tried deleting all partitions and recreating? Use diskpart to do it: http://www.computerhope.com/diskpart.htm
What happens if you boot to dos and run fdisk? Can you delete then re-create the partitions and format them to fat32?
I meant to say with a dos startup disk. you can make one from within windows.
what happens if you use a windows xp cd if you have one, if not then possibly see if windows 2000 or another o/s has something simmiliar with regards to the fixmbr command that windows xp repair console has as far as I know. Other then that fdisk has the command :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q69013/
http://www.cknow.com/vtutor/vtfdiskmbr.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=166454
Take a look at those :)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q69013/
http://www.cknow.com/vtutor/vtfdiskmbr.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=166454
Take a look at those :)
ASKER
When I use the XP disk to format the drive I get a windows error message saying that the hard drive has a problem and to prevent damage to my system it will not continue.
I tried the windows startup disk and it would not work either.
I tried the windows startup disk and it would not work either.
Does the same happen when you have it attached to another computer ? If not then it must be something related to your motherboard, if the same thing happens then it must obviously be something with the hard drive.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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I would probably be easier to zero fill the drive and start over.