Will a dead hard drive cripple a system? and other questions.

[dbubd]

I have a 120 Gig Western Digital IDE drive that, whenever I put it into
my system, causes it to hang indefinitly. I'd like to wipe it clean
with Killdisk, but even that fails to initialize from a bootable CD
(Windows XP CD is the same when trying to do a reapir installation).
When I take the drive out, Presto!, my system works like it should. The
thing is, the hard drive in question is the one that I pulled out of my
old system before I upgraded and it worked fine in the new system, that
is, up until I began deleting partitions in DOS in an attempt to
completely reformat it. Does this sound like a dead drive or might
there be an alternate solution; something I'm not thinking of doing.

The only reason I'm posting these questions is that I'm sceptical that
it's a complete failure and don't want to trash what might be a
perfectly fine bit of hardware that's just screwed up from a corrupt
partition table or something like that (I'm no expert). I'm basically
trying to get some information / verification / tips / solutions before
I ditch the HD and get a new one. My goal would be to find some way to
get my computer to register it so that I can wipe it clean and get on
with my life.

Thanks,
Matthew

 

[Rod Speed]

I have a 120 Gig Western Digital IDE drive that, whenever
I put it into my system, causes it to hang indefinitly.

The problem is that WD drives have a unique jumper
config when the drive is the only drive on the ribbon cable.
http://wdc.com/en/library/eide/2579-001037.pdf

I'd like to wipe it clean with Killdisk, but even that fails to initialize
from a bootable CD (Windows XP CD is the same when trying to
do a reapir installation). When I take the drive out, Presto!, my
system works like it should. The thing is, the hard drive in question
is the one that I pulled out of my old system before I upgraded and
it worked fine in the new system, that is, up until I began deleting
partitions in DOS in an attempt to completely reformat it. Does
this sound like a dead drive
Nope.

or might there be an alternate solution; something I'm not thinking of doing.

Yep, you havent got it jumpered correctly.

The only reason I'm posting these questions
is that I'm sceptical that it's a complete failure

Yeah, if its still spinning up, it will be the jumpering.

and don't want to trash what might be a perfectly fine
bit of hardware that's just screwed up from a corrupt
partition table or something like that (I'm no expert).
I'm basically trying to get some information / verification
/ tips / solutions before I ditch the HD and get a new one.
My goal would be to find some way to get my computer to
register it so that I can wipe it clean and get on with my life.

Just jumper it correctly.

If that doesnt fix it, try another ribbon cable
and make sure its still spinning up.