I feel funny asking but..

Last night I did some bad stuff to my PC; started wiping the HD, and stopped in the middle; then, did a full O&O defrag and went to sleep..
Woke up to BSOD, and "Hard drive may be damaged" message..

Can't do a complete format; it stops 1/2 through and says hd may be damaged...

Any suggestions or ideas?

I know I should have known better, but sometimes you just do stupid stuff!


wase4711

Try a low level format of the hard drive and see if that resets it back. It will wipe the WHOLE drive regardless of any partitions, they will be wiped too.

Or you can try to ZAP it first just to see what happens. A low level format is a tedious task and seldom necessary, sort of very last resort.
ZAP can be found at IBM and is a utility that erases all partition information.

I think I am on the road to recovery now; one question:
How long should it take to convert a 120 gig from fat 32 to NTFS?

I installed win 98 cause I had a restoration cd; now, I am installing the OEM XP home version, and it was going very well ; It asked me if I wanted to convert to NTFS, which, of course, I do, so I am going through the process. There is no "progress bar" showing, and Windows said it will take "some time" to convert to NTFS.
I was just wondering how long I should wait before getting nervvous again!
If I recall, the first time I did this a long, long time ago, it took at least an hour to convert...

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

wase4711

Not that long to be honest. Heck of a lot shorter than reformatting it as NTFS!

so, about an hour or 2 hours to convert a 120 gig?

I'm just afraid the pc is hung...


thanks!


wase4711

This not take two hours to convert a 120 gig hard drive :o

What is the brand of your HD ?

You can't convert Win98 to NTFS. If you installed Win98 and it worked, and now you are installing XP, you need to format C:

You should just boot from XP, format C: and install XP.

}---:)

Hi all;


Well, the nightmare is done..I have learned a couple things..

-dont wipe your hd, then defrag. without booting first!
-when you convert to ntfs from fat 32, you need to restart your pc to begin the process!

thanks to all who gave ideas; actually, i had some bad sectors, and fdisk does the job admirably!


wase4711