Error writing fat format terminated

  • Thread starter Thread starter Susma Rio Sep
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Susma Rio Sep

It seems now clear that the trouble of my hard disk is with the FAT.

How do I know whether it is a virus or some non-physical damage, or it
is a physical damage, like analogically an eye of a human face being
gouged out?

If it is a physical damage, can this be repaired at all by
technicians?

If it is a non-physical damage like virus or wrong partitioning or
wrong procedure or whatever, can some software or procedure be used to
restore it, so that it can be fdisked and formatted without any error
message or the whole system hanging up?

Please suggest some ideas.

Thanks a lot to all who react to this SOS for help.

Susma Rio Sep
 
It seems now clear that the trouble of my hard disk is with the FAT.

How do I know whether it is a virus or some non-physical damage, or it
is a physical damage, like analogically an eye of a human face being
gouged out?

If it is a physical damage, can this be repaired at all by
technicians?

If it is a non-physical damage like virus or wrong partitioning or
wrong procedure or whatever, can some software or procedure be used to
restore it, so that it can be fdisked and formatted without any error
message or the whole system hanging up?

Please suggest some ideas.

Thanks a lot to all who react to this SOS for help.

Susma Rio Sep
Click to expand...

Run the manufacturer's diagnostics, which should've came in drive
retail packages or is available for download from the respective drive
manufacturer's website.

If you're simply wanting to FDISK and format it, have you tried to do
so, and exactly what happened if/when you did? If it was an error
message, what was that message?

You might make sure you're booting to a fresh Windows boot floppy, not
that drive, and do an "FDISK /mbr" command to rewrite the master boot
record. Before any of this it's important to assess the fitness of
the drive with the manufacturer's utilities.
 
I obtained this Seagate HD with 408 megs from the flea market, and it
had served me for four years as a backup HD to my primary HD.

Recently it started acting funny, like going absent without leave.

Scandisk revealed several errors of misplaced files, which it tried to
correct by messing up the files with renaming into someting like
Dir00000 and file0000.chk; or it simply could not finish its scanning
operation.

So I saved as much of important files as I needed, and did various
formattings in all kinds of options, which went perfectly well up to
"format completed", where the operation continued quietly for some
time then finally coming up with a message 'Error writing fat -
formated terminated".

Now I did several Fdisk operations on it, using various tricks, like
partitioning it into a very small primary partition and a remainder
big one of extended-logical partition, hoping to just format the
extended-logical one. This last procedure appeared to work on Windows
but only up to the screen graphics, because inside the HD itself
things seemingly were not getting done for apparently a lack of a
workable FAT.

I am trying to get a diagnostics file from Seagate, but its website
requires a plugin which I have downloaded, the plugin; but can't get
it to work with my browser, Mozilla.

Anyway, the curiosity is now plainly academic, for the furtherance of
our education or correctly mine.

My next questions to the techinicians in Groups are:

1. How does a HD get physically damaged so that no software can fix
it, meaning it can only be fixed if possible by opening it up and
working on its 'physicalities' -- which is certainly a very unfeasible
option compared to getting another working one brand new or from the
flea market.

2. What are these physical damages?

3. How do we prevent them if possible, i.e., aside from its being worn
out from normal tour of duty.

4. If a HD is not pnysically damaged, can there be a problem that is
beyond software to fix?

I guess maybe the technicians have to define what are physical damages
and what are software or computer 'psychological' damages; and maybe
there are three kinds of problems: a) physical ones, b) curable
software kinds, c) incurable computer 'psychological' kinds -- if such
a third category is extant.

Thanks to all you guys who read this post and care to react for my
education, and if possible help in the healing and rehab of my
troubled HD.

Susma Rio Sep
 
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