Unable to partition or format hard drive

Curlyben · Apr 21, 2007, 04:01 PM

OK what are you try to achieve here.
I'm bemused that you are try to partition a 6Gb drive, seems a bit of a waste of time.
What OS are you looking to install, as part of the XP install is partition and format ?
Also you start by mentioning a Toshiba machine than go on to talk about a Gateway one. Which is it ?

holyhoney · Apr 21, 2007, 04:09 PM

Sorry if little confusing but daylight now here and I still no closer

It is a Gateway laptop with a toshiba hard drive and all I am trying to do is re-install any operating system so that my young daughter may use it

I was not trying to partition a 6 gig hard drive.....that would make no sense, all I want to do is format the hard drive which it will not do until it has a dos partition which I cannot get any fdisk program to do

itsjb5 · Apr 21, 2007, 04:51 PM

Does it see the hard drive? Maybe set to slave and not master.

holyhoney · Apr 21, 2007, 05:15 PM

When I boot up with a win98 boot disk in the floppy I get 2 msg's - 1st, failure fixed disk 1, press F1 to resume , F2 to setup....I press resume (F1) and it all seems to go fine until windows is due to start, then I get 2nd message saying that there is no partition on the hard drive and to use fdisk at the a: prompt......upon doing that I get a final message saying error reading disk

If I use the 6 windows xp floppies I am able to boot all the way up until it needs to read the cd-rom.....which it is unable to find due to the problem that this laptop does not allow for both floppy and cd-rom to plugged in at the same time

To add to my woes, the cd-rom only works part of the time.....well actually only once and I cannot remember what settings I changed to get it to work........yes I tell it to boot from the cd-rom but it just won't do it........someone said it mite be a memory problem?

ScottGem · Apr 21, 2007, 06:29 PM

Sounds to me like the drive is dead.

holyhoney · Apr 21, 2007, 06:36 PM

Finally, I can lay it to rest..........thank you......I really wanted to make sure as a new one will cost a little more than I have, but I have tried everything and read just about everything so I am feeling better about taking the hard drive on a long drive to the country hehehe

But I will connect it to my pc first just to make sure

Thank you for your help and time

TheSavage · Apr 21, 2007, 06:48 PM

Lol -- you could have connected to your desktop for reformat --install operating system also -- Savage

lchabo_2001 · May 17, 2007, 09:10 AM

Look for the "load default values" key from the bios setup and proceed to do that. Then try to reboot. If that fails then I think the hard drive is truly damaged and cannot be used.
Also try installing linux on it and if you get the same situation then you have to conclude that the disk cannot be used.

Unable to partition or format hard drive

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