[Philwn]

I only just thought about this My old machine has a Hard drive with bad sectors, When installing new install of XP I have to lower the partition size otherwise it fails to format, anyone know of any method to fix this?

Im not that bothered if you cant and dont believe it to be possible but just incase anyone know?

 

[Xavier1421]

Sometimes its not bad sectors, its the method in which the computer is accessing those sectors.

In your BIOS, try autodetecting the format of the drive. This should automatically happen anyways, but sometimes its up to the user to determine if its LBA, etc. (LBA is Logical Block Addressing)

I bought a hitachi drive I think it was, and my DFI Ultra wouldnt autodetect it, I kept getting format errors, and it was driving me up the wall!!

Find out what kind of drive it is, how large it is, and see what the translation method is (usually located on the sticker thats on the HD, but if not, then google!)

Once I manually chose the setting, the HD has worked like a charm since...

How large is this HD?

 

[xms]

Can you plug the hard disk into a machine that has a copy of windows on it?

If so, get windows to do a scandisk of that drive, it will mark all bad sectors not usable, then format it in windows, move the disk back to your other machine, and hopefully you should be able to install XP on it.

 

[Philwn]

Xavier, I will look at details when home i Know it is a maxtor 60GB

XMS, I managed to get windows installed on it anyway I lowered partition size so it would format without coming to bad sectors and used excess as seperate partition for D drive.

 

[Evil XP2400]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Philwn Xavier, I will look at details when home i Know it is a maxtor 60GB XMS, I managed to get windows installed on it anyway I lowered partition size so it would format without coming to bad sectors and used excess as seperate partition for D drive.

So run scandisk on partition D: so windows can mark those bad sectors unusable.

 

[Xavier1421]

Try manually changing it to LBA in your bios.

LBA is the norm for 500+ megabyte HD's.. See if it clears it up.

What did you have to set your partition to in order to install?

 

[Philwn]

something stupid like 12GB