Can't Delete Partition
So, here's my long, sad story...
About a month ago my year-old Western Digital Caviar 120gb SE drive started acting kinda strange, slow access, etc. One day, I boot up computer, S.M.A.R.T. report 'imminent hard drive failure: backup data immediately' but that was too late, won't boot into windows. I try booting with another drive to try and recover data, but unfortunately I only have a 2gb drive with Win98, so I decide to order a new drive and wait for it to arrive.
I order a Seagate 200gb drive w/8mb buffer from NewEgg. It arrives, I copy about half of my data over (some directories copied but with nothing in them, drive was very flaky, only about 1/2 of the data was accessible) so I use the new 200gb drive, and send the 120 off to WD for RMA. They send me a new one, I get it and have little use for it but decide I'll just hang onto it for a while.
About a week after I got my RMA 120 drive, I come home from work when I had left the computer on to a blinking cursor that says MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM. I say hmmm.... try rebooting, same message. So I take it out, install XP on the 120 RMA drive and then install the 200 gig to try to recover my data. XP shows the second drive as 0 Bytes RAW File Format. Grrr...so, with the help of fellow Short-Median Mondi I am able to recover my data. So, I two drives fail, one brand new, within a month of each other.
So, fast forward to today, I decide that I'm going to reformat the 200gb and maybe the file system just went bad. So I try formatting through XP, shows 127gb free space, hmm, should be around 186gb (because of the whole 1000bytes=kilobyte for HD / 1024 bytes=kilobyte for windows) so I decide to boot off a bootable Win98 disk to fdisk.
Fdisk shows "PRIMARY NON-DOS PARTITION (NTFS) 56000Mbytes" I scratch my head and ignore it. I delete this partition and try to make a new one, but it takes forever to "Verify the Drive Integrity" but it finishes, tells me to reboot.
So I reboot, go into fdisk to check partitions. Shows 1 partition "PRIMARY NON DOS PARTITION (NTFS) 56000Mbytes" I go uhhh wtf.
So, thinking maybe I gotta delete partition then reboot before making a new one....I reboot, then delete the partition that's on there, exit FDISK and reboot again, and what do I see
"PRIMARY NON-DOS PARTITION (NTFS 56000bytes)" I then proceed to flip out. What is going on here, how could I have possibly deleted this partition like 3 or 4 times and created a new one only to have it there again, is this like some persistent demon partition that won't die??
So my guess is maybe that the write heads or something went bad, or this MONTH OLD drive must just be RMA bound because my 200gb drive is showing 127gb in windows, 56gb in DOS and a partition that cannot be deleted. Or I'm going crazy. What do you guys make of this insanity?
About a month ago my year-old Western Digital Caviar 120gb SE drive started acting kinda strange, slow access, etc. One day, I boot up computer, S.M.A.R.T. report 'imminent hard drive failure: backup data immediately' but that was too late, won't boot into windows. I try booting with another drive to try and recover data, but unfortunately I only have a 2gb drive with Win98, so I decide to order a new drive and wait for it to arrive.
I order a Seagate 200gb drive w/8mb buffer from NewEgg. It arrives, I copy about half of my data over (some directories copied but with nothing in them, drive was very flaky, only about 1/2 of the data was accessible) so I use the new 200gb drive, and send the 120 off to WD for RMA. They send me a new one, I get it and have little use for it but decide I'll just hang onto it for a while.
About a week after I got my RMA 120 drive, I come home from work when I had left the computer on to a blinking cursor that says MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM. I say hmmm.... try rebooting, same message. So I take it out, install XP on the 120 RMA drive and then install the 200 gig to try to recover my data. XP shows the second drive as 0 Bytes RAW File Format. Grrr...so, with the help of fellow Short-Median Mondi I am able to recover my data. So, I two drives fail, one brand new, within a month of each other.
So, fast forward to today, I decide that I'm going to reformat the 200gb and maybe the file system just went bad. So I try formatting through XP, shows 127gb free space, hmm, should be around 186gb (because of the whole 1000bytes=kilobyte for HD / 1024 bytes=kilobyte for windows) so I decide to boot off a bootable Win98 disk to fdisk.
Fdisk shows "PRIMARY NON-DOS PARTITION (NTFS) 56000Mbytes" I scratch my head and ignore it. I delete this partition and try to make a new one, but it takes forever to "Verify the Drive Integrity" but it finishes, tells me to reboot.
So I reboot, go into fdisk to check partitions. Shows 1 partition "PRIMARY NON DOS PARTITION (NTFS) 56000Mbytes" I go uhhh wtf.
So, thinking maybe I gotta delete partition then reboot before making a new one....I reboot, then delete the partition that's on there, exit FDISK and reboot again, and what do I see
"PRIMARY NON-DOS PARTITION (NTFS 56000bytes)" I then proceed to flip out. What is going on here, how could I have possibly deleted this partition like 3 or 4 times and created a new one only to have it there again, is this like some persistent demon partition that won't die??
So my guess is maybe that the write heads or something went bad, or this MONTH OLD drive must just be RMA bound because my 200gb drive is showing 127gb in windows, 56gb in DOS and a partition that cannot be deleted. Or I'm going crazy. What do you guys make of this insanity?
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Comments
FDISK
Format
DEBUG
on it then go Here Erasing Partition and run this if it was on the drive, it wont be anymore. and you will then after running debug run fdisk to repartition and then format....
But MMC is showing max size as 128gb
SeaTools says "200GB Drive" but I think that might just be a title built into the drive because the PRIMARY DISK on bootup shows 200gb capacity, but I can only see 128gb.
(in this screencap I had just deleted the before mentioned undeletable partition, and now shows 128gb on Disk 1)
If it does not say "Service Pack 1" or greater, an upgrade is required to support drives larger than 137GB.