primary disk still fails

[Aaron]

Hello, I posted a couple days ago. I have a 60 gb hdd from WD. I get an
error that states "Primary Disk Fails" when I boot. "Dude" suggested that I
low level format. Which I did. I placed this HDD into another computer. Ran
every diagnostic tool from WD on it. It didnt, but now it does pass with
flying colors. I ran a complete scan disk from windows and it came back with
0 bytes in bad sectors. It did have bad sectors priror to the low level
format. The drive works well as a storage drive because I can put data on it
without any conflict. But when I goto setup windows 2000 profressional. It
still comes with the "Primary Disk Fail hit f1 to continue" Which in turn
this HDD cannont be used to boot off of. The drive seems to run smooth and
work fine now but this error from bios. Any suggestions how to resolve my
problem? Thank you Aaron

 

[Rod Speed]

Hello, I posted a couple days ago. I have a 60 gb hdd from WD. I get an
error that states "Primary Disk Fails" when I boot. "Dude" suggested that I
low level format. Which I did. I placed this HDD into another computer. Ran
every diagnostic tool from WD on it. It didnt, but now it does pass with
flying colors. I ran a complete scan disk from windows and it came back with
0 bytes in bad sectors. It did have bad sectors priror to the low level
format. The drive works well as a storage drive because I can put data on it
without any conflict. But when I goto setup windows 2000 profressional. It
still comes with the "Primary Disk Fail hit f1 to continue" Which in turn
this HDD cannont be used to boot off of. The drive seems to run smooth and
work fine now but this error from bios. Any suggestions how to resolve my
problem?

Return it.

Win 2K drives it a lot harder than when its used for data.

 

[CJT]

Hello, I posted a couple days ago. I have a 60 gb hdd from WD. I get an
error that states "Primary Disk Fails" when I boot. "Dude" suggested that I
low level format. Which I did. I placed this HDD into another computer. Ran
every diagnostic tool from WD on it. It didnt, but now it does pass with
flying colors. I ran a complete scan disk from windows and it came back with
0 bytes in bad sectors. It did have bad sectors priror to the low level
format. The drive works well as a storage drive because I can put data on it
without any conflict. But when I goto setup windows 2000 profressional. It
still comes with the "Primary Disk Fail hit f1 to continue" Which in turn
this HDD cannont be used to boot off of. The drive seems to run smooth and
work fine now but this error from bios. Any suggestions how to resolve my
problem? Thank you Aaron

Maybe the controller is failing.

 

[Eric Gisin]

Try the disk on the other IDE channel with another cable. Make sure IDE BIOS
settings are all AUTO.

 

[Rod Speed]

Return it.

Win 2K drives it a lot harder than when its used for data.

Aaron replied via email, I prefer to stick to the newsgroup.

but its not just win 2k, If i were to install ANYTHING including linux i would
still get this primary disk fail,

Thats not that unusual with a flakey drive subsystem.
They can work with data but fail an install because any
install tends to use the drive subsystem a lot harder.

even tho i got rid off ALL the bad sectors and formated it plenty of time, so
my assumption is, the drive is fine,

You cant assume that. I have seen some systems that fail
an install repeatedly but which pass the diagnostics fine.
In fact I have used the install as a more thorough test of
the system for that reason, repeatedly installing while I
work out what it is about the system that it doesnt like.

Yes, that can certainly be other than the drive.

how to get rid of this primary disk error?

You basically need to work out why its
happening and fix what is producing that error.

In one system it turned out to be that the motherboard
didnt like mixed parity and non parity ram.

do i need to somehow reinitialize SMART or something?

Nope, that shouldnt be relevant.

im lost at this point, thus why i turned to the newsgroups

OK.

I'd minimise the system, back to the bare minimum that can
do a install, just the video, hard drive and cdrom drive, with
the minimum amount of memory that will work in that system.

See if you can do an install in that config. If you can,
add the extra stuff back piece by piece and try the
install from scratch with each bit added back.

If you still cant do the install on the minimum hardware, try
doing the install with the drive in a completely different PC to
see if its the drive or something about the PC thats the problem.

And run the diags in the system that you have a problem
installing in too. It may be a problem with the controller
or even just the ribbon cable etc, not the drive.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Try the disk on the other IDE channel with another cable. Make sure IDE BIOS
settings are all AUTO.

Oh?
Please explain how he didn't get that message without changing any bios set-
tings for a while but does get them back when he starts windows 2000 setup.