seagate 80gig drive will NOT partition successfully

[DanMorrish]

I am having major problems with my 80gig seagate hard drive which I use as a storage disk. I am using windows xp which will only find the drive in disk management and not my computer. It seems to think it is 677gigs in size? When I try to initialize the drive Windows returns an error, statiing it cannot write to the disk. I have tried using every program I know to define the partitions on the drive but to no avail. I have used the version of disk manager that is supplied with the drive AND used the updated versions for both windows (the 32 bit version) and dos. The program returns an error stating no partitions defined. This is funny because I am using the program to define the partition in the first place! I have tried the updated version of fdisk which will partition the drive but when you restart the pc and reopen fdisk, it fails to recognise the partition. I have used both partion magic 7 and 8 to no avail. And I have also performed a zero fill format to start again. But I am going around in circles. My system BIOS recognises the correct capacity of the drive. Arghhhh!!! Help.

 

[muckshifter]

What motherboard are you using?

What IDE is it on?

Where is it connected to on the IDE cable. On all 80's cables Blue is MB, gray is slave and black is master.

Is it jumpered correctly? (do not use cable select)

Try it on its own, as master leaving your other drive disconected, and boot to CD using your XP CD to format it to NTFS.

 

[muckshifter]

Oh, and welcome to the forum.

 

[DanMorrish]

Ive got the drive as slave on IDE 1. The jumpers are set specifically to slave I have had problems with cable select in the past.
The motherboard is an Elite K7S5A. I have recently flash updated to the latest version of the BIOS for this board. I am not in front of the computer at this time so I cannot remember what version this is. But I haven't had any problems with the drive since the flash. I have tried to put the drive on its own as master. The problem is the damn OS cd (WinXP Pro) skips the boot record so tries to boot from the next item down the list; IDE 0 (the actual disk itself) where of course we cannot boot from as there is no O/S installed. I don't know why this is. It has happened several times before. I know the boot record on the cd is intact because the CD is virtually brand new and has no scratches. I have several OS's and the only one that boots from cd successfully is WIN2K. This also fails when trying to partition and format the drive as NTFS as part of the installation process.
The problems first started when I tried to format the master drive and repartition it. That went successfully but I strangely lost all the data on the slave drive, and since then Windows will not detect it.

 

[DanMorrish]

I didn't say thankyou for replying. Thanks. Jason says Hi by the way.

 

[muckshifter]

Hmmm, looking more like a defective drive ... have you tried it in another machine?


Who's Jason? but Hi anyway.

 

[DanMorrish]

Not yet. I am going to give it to someone next week. I will keep you posted. Do you know of the best way to send it back to be repaired. I don't want to have to pay any expensive charges. If it is expensive it is probably better to buy another drive as they are so cheap at the moment.

 

[Randell]

I found a utility called part.exe which did the job just fine. Was having the same problem this evening and decided to try an oldy program I had and it worked.