Formatting problems with WD Drives > 137 GB

[Ralph]

I'm using Win XP (current with all updates) with a Western
Digital 180 GB drive, set up with two equally sized
partitions. Everything was working fine for several
months, until during one bootup scandisk ran & said "2nd
NTFS Boot Sector is unreadable" on the second partion of
the WD drive.

I've been trying to reformat the partition to recreate the
2nd boot sector, but no luck. Win XP will not format the
partition. It comes back with an error msg that
says "cannot complete formating." I've used Partition
Magic (v8), and it says everything is fine (no errors).
Wester Digital's Lifeguard utilities also says there are
no errors. I could use the partition OK, but was nervous
that disaster was lurking to land upon me. But still I
couldn't get Win XP to format it successfully.

Win XP's recovery console's attempt at Chkdsk /r came back
with the error msg said there were "1 or more
unrecoverable errors". (Very informative, isn't it?)

I then tried to go to just one, large partition. Win XP
came back with the same error msg. So I went back to two
partitions. The first partition looked OK, but I received
the same error msg for the second partition again.

Anyone have any ideas????

Do I really need a "2nd NTFS Boot Sector"?????

Or can I live without it (other than not begin able to
format it in Win XP)???????????

Thanks!

 

[Alex Nichol]

I'm using Win XP (current with all updates) with a Western
Digital 180 GB drive, set up with two equally sized
partitions. Everything was working fine for several
months, until during one bootup scandisk ran & said "2nd
NTFS Boot Sector is unreadable" on the second partion of
the WD drive.

I've been trying to reformat the partition to recreate the
2nd boot sector, but no luck. Win XP will not format the
partition.

Try at recovery console, selecting the partition and using
Fixboot

Also check in your BIOS setup to see if there is a setting related to 48
bit LBA which has become disabled - 48 bit LBA is needed to go past 128
(binary GB = 137 decimal)