Will a dead hard drive cripple a system? and other questions.

  • Thread starter Thread starter dbubd
  • Start date Start date
D

dbubd

I have a 120 Gig Western Digital IDE drive that, whenever I put it into
my system, causes it to hang indefinitly. I'd like to wipe it clean
with Killdisk, but even that fails to initialize from a bootable CD
(Windows XP CD is the same when trying to do a reapir installation).
When I take the drive out, Presto!, my system works like it should. The
thing is, the hard drive in question is the one that I pulled out of my
old system before I upgraded and it worked fine in the new system, that
is, up until I began deleting partitions in DOS in an attempt to
completely reformat it. Does this sound like a dead drive or might
there be an alternate solution; something I'm not thinking of doing.

The only reason I'm posting these questions is that I'm sceptical that
it's a complete failure and don't want to trash what might be a
perfectly fine bit of hardware that's just screwed up from a corrupt
partition table or something like that (I'm no expert). I'm basically
trying to get some information / verification / tips / solutions before
I ditch the HD and get a new one. My goal would be to find some way to
get my computer to register it so that I can wipe it clean and get on
with my life.

Thanks,
Matthew
 
dbubd said:
I have a 120 Gig Western Digital IDE drive that, whenever
I put it into my system, causes it to hang indefinitly.
Click to expand...

The problem is that WD drives have a unique jumper
config when the drive is the only drive on the ribbon cable.
http://wdc.com/en/library/eide/2579-001037.pdf
I'd like to wipe it clean with Killdisk, but even that fails to initialize
from a bootable CD (Windows XP CD is the same when trying to
do a reapir installation). When I take the drive out, Presto!, my
system works like it should. The thing is, the hard drive in question
is the one that I pulled out of my old system before I upgraded and
it worked fine in the new system, that is, up until I began deleting
partitions in DOS in an attempt to completely reformat it. Does
this sound like a dead drive
Nope.

or might there be an alternate solution; something I'm not thinking of doing.
Click to expand...

Yep, you havent got it jumpered correctly.
The only reason I'm posting these questions
is that I'm sceptical that it's a complete failure
Click to expand...

Yeah, if its still spinning up, it will be the jumpering.
and don't want to trash what might be a perfectly fine
bit of hardware that's just screwed up from a corrupt
partition table or something like that (I'm no expert).
I'm basically trying to get some information / verification
/ tips / solutions before I ditch the HD and get a new one.
My goal would be to find some way to get my computer to
register it so that I can wipe it clean and get on with my life.
Click to expand...

Just jumper it correctly.

If that doesnt fix it, try another ribbon cable
and make sure its still spinning up.
 
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