Ok I wanted a little extra storage and had a WD 40gig IDE drive from an old computer. I installed it on the slave port of my master ide channel with my 160gig on the master port. After powering up the computer device manager recognized the hd and installed it. I was able to see the HD in "my computer" and see the files on it. Since I no longer needed this data I right clicked on it and choose format. It went though most of the way and then error'd and said that the drive couldn't be formatted. Now anytime you try to access the hd it says its not formatted and if you try it just fails immediately. The most strange part is that it never shows in disk manager, but does show in "my computer" and in the bios. Both HD have the jumpers set for cable select.

cliffs
installed old hd
was able to read files
formatted drive, which failed

 

Disable Cable Select. Set the master to master and the slave to, you guessed it, slave.

Try that and see if it works. Also, if you can, try the 2nd HDD on a different IDE channel still set to slave.

 

Second ide channel is full but I will change the jumper selections. Is XP really stupid enough to not work with cable select?

 

jumpers changed and same thing...

Why do I have to be a nerd and want to fix this stuff

 

During boot, does it show up as a drive in the IDE scan?

 

yup, shows up in the scan and in bios as well as device manager

 

Give this a shot:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/


Download, burn to CD, then boot from it.

The HDD diagnostic tools should be able to get you either going or to the knowledge that the drive may just be kaput.

I forgot to ask, does the drive still physically spin when powered up?

 

run chkdsk d:

or whatever the slave drive is?



Long shot, but is the IDE ribbon cable a 40 or 80 wire?

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/conf_Cable80.htm

Some mobos can have problems identifying a HDD if it's not a 80 wire ribbon.

 

I say just do a low level format and start the fuck over since there's nothing on there. If that doesn't work than your drive es muerte.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...mat-Tool.shtml

 

Have you tried rolling back/updating the drivers in device manager? Does it show up in device manager?

Also check the thread below. The user had a similar problem with a WD hard drive.

http://www.pchelpforum.com/hard-driv...ment-help.html

 

I'd think that the LLF utility should get you squared away. You could always boot off of an xp disk and format using the setup process.

 

Ok so the newest news is that last night I booted from my XP disk and formatted the drive. The install started and ran until it needed to reboot the PC. This is when the story goes downhill...

The PC then booted from the new HD instead of my existing HD. I didn't want that so I unplugged the new HD. Now the PC will not boot into my old drive at all. So I booted from the XP disk again and choose to repair my install. Everything seemed ok but now it just boots to a blank screen in normal mode and freezes at mup.sys in safe mode. Trying to run the repair again shows that no XP install is reconized. However I have a killdisk boot floppy that I can boot from and will allow me to see my partitions and files...everything is still there.

So at this point im going to buy an external case and copy all my important files over to our laptop and then just do a fresh install.

 

Jesus, usually you need an advanced degree to screw stuff up this badly!

You win.

Good luck with the fresh install.

 

It's so worth the extra 40GB

 

Wasn't it willdogs that started a thread on tossing an old HD into the lake when it went bad?
OP may wish to consider doing the same, at this point...

 

You didn't unplug all the other drives when you formatted? You don't need to load all the xp setup files to the new drive after format, just format and turn the thing off. Then reinstall your primary drive, point the BIOS there for boot and it should be fine...

 

Hiren's Boot CD > UBCD

http://www.hirensbootcd.net/

 

Whopper vs. Big Mac.

 

so after some research I think that the problem may be that the C drive my no longer be the active partition. I am going to check that once I get my external case

 

Any partition manager should be able to fix this. Gparted comes to mind.