Herrin811

Thats right...Dead Right There

Dad got a nasty trojan on his Dell, and NOTHING would remove the thing....Im not sure if the trojan was moving, or replicating, but the virus scanners were reporting the trojan in several different folders, all of which didnt exist when I viewed the explorer windows (temporary internet files)....Weird

Anyway we backed up all his good stuf, pix and such...All disks are clean....So today I slapped in the XP disk, and attempted to format C:\ and reinstall XP...

The format completed 100% in just over an hour, then reported "Format Unsucessful". The XP installer halted and said to reboot...This I did....

When the installer began again, it reported "Destination Drive Corrupt" and failed again...Once again I reboot from the CD....

So this time It tells me "Unable to access destination disk"...I ran a couple utilities that showed me that there was no partitions on C:\....

So XP wont install without a destination partition, and this thing is DEAD....It is a Maxtor ATA drive, I came back home and downloaded PowerMax from Maxtor, and made a bootable cd....Hopefully this will allow me to reformat and partition the drive....

Does anyone have any advice for me? I've given my pc a "refreshing" just like this 3 or 4 times, without any issue....Never had a problem like this....Heck, I've even formatted and partitioned the hard drive in my DVR without a problem...Come on gurus...Thoughts? any utilities you recommend?

edwinsmith

Your CMOS may be corrupted. Find the jumper to clear the CMOS and reset it. Then use the XP CD again and see if it will format. If not you may need to use another PC to download a disk utility from the Maxtor site to low level format the drive to fix bad sectors.

If the Maxtor utility doesn't fix it see if it's still under warranty from Maxtor. There is a web page to do that on the Maxtor site. If it's under warranty they'll swap you a new one and all you have to do is ship it to them.

Edwin

marine4life

edwin is right, run the maxtor utility from a floppy to see if the hard drive is bad, if it is than send it in, maxtor is really good about getting you a new drive if it is under warranty, i think it is a year warranty, but if it is not, then you might have to get a new hard drive. they are getting pretty cheap now, you can get a 200gb ata for 100-150 dollars now, not too bad.

Herrin811

I had to make a bootable cd since his pc doesnt have a floppy...And it is out of warranty....I've already told him to expect to buy a new one....hopefully it can be recovered tho....We'll see....

Herrin811

Well I ran a system test in Powermax, and it immdiately reported "Drive failed and should be replaced" I went ahead a tried a ful zero-fill, and it worked! After the format all test passed, and I reinstalled everything without a hitch.....

edwinsmith

Yeah, I've had that happen on all sorts of drives. The factory utilities do a good job of fixing soft errors. Just be sure to use the Maxtor utility on Maxtor, Seagate on Seagate etc... They know the magic words for their own stuff.

Glad you got it fixed.

I had a power problem on a ThinkPad once which took out the hard drive. The Bios said the drive was bad but the IBM utility fixed it up and It's still running years later.

Edwin