i have a Toshiba MK6014MAP 6gig hard drive that i am unable to partition, reformate, fdisk i am unable to do anything with it

i have tried fdisk through dos and a windows98 bootdisc, i have tried partition magic, also ultimate boot cd, just about anything you can think of to no avail.

the newest msg i get is "failure fixed disk 1"

i am using a Gateway 2000 Solo Laptop which does not allow for the floppy and cd-rom to run at the same time (there is only one slot, so it is one or the other)

i am able to get the laptop to boot using the windows XP 6 discs but this setup cancells once it needs to read the cd-rom, otherwise no other boot disk will work

also the bios is "Phoenix Bios Note Bios 4.0 setup 1985-96 - Version 7.44". as my knowledge in bios is very limited i am unsure if this is all correct as it seems to me that there is a couple of different things conflicting ontop of the hard drive problem

please help

Lisa

Curlyben

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

sorry if lil 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

does it see the harddrive? maybe set to slave and not master.

holyhoney

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 msg 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 msg saying error reading disk

if i use the 6 windows xp floppies i am able to boot all the way up untill 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 wat 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

Sounds to me like the drive is dead.

holyhoney

finally, i can lay it to rest..........thank you......i really wanted to make sure as a new one will cost a lil 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

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

lchabo_2001

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 harddrive is truly damaged and cannot be used.
also try installing linux on it and if u get the same situation then you have to conclude that the disk cannot be used.