I can’t format my HD anymore. When I try to format it it usually says
Formatting 19,07.15M
Trying to recover allocation unit 146,781
Though the recover allocation unit does change, albeit very slowly.
Does this mean my HD is pretty much dead? Or can it can it be saved?
Thanks
Mitch
does it make a sound?
can you feel that the disk spinns?
what do you use to format it?
does it pass the BIOS SMART tests?
there are a suite of hard drive checking programs out there to test your hard drive, what manufacturer is it?
Maxtor, Western Digital, each have their own free software you can use to test and format the drive.
Also many free ones available on the web which use the same technology.
It might just be having a bad day, configured incorrectly, bad jumper switches, could be your IDE controller if your computer REALLY old, or maybe your HD is toast.
Use Manufacturer;s software or the freebie ones to find out 
The HD is on my laptop, a Toshiba. My OS is gone cause I was reinstalling w/ the toshiba CD’s. I can’t even get it to boot from the CD anymore so I using a win98 bootdisk so I can at least get it to boot. I can’t access the BIOS i don’t think. There’s currently no format on it at all, it says Invalid media type when i try and run chkdsk or scandisk.
I’ll look into the hard drive checking progs. THanks
of course you can access your bios
that will be a good way to know if your hd is still working
if the bios can find your hd it should still work
try to press f2 or del to enter the bios
if that does not work check the manual or the web
[quote=“fangstar”]The HD is on my laptop, a Toshiba. My OS is gone cause I was reinstalling w/ the toshiba CD’s. I can’t even get it to boot from the CD anymore so I using a win98 bootdisk so I can at least get it to boot. I can’t access the BIOS I don’t think. There’s currently no format on it at all, it says Invalid media type when I try and run chkdsk or scandisk.
I’ll look into the hard drive checking progs. THanks[/quote]
If this disaster occurred while you were in the process of reinstalling from the CD, I’d suspect it was just a software glitch that messed things up. For example, could be a scratch on the CD, dust on the CDROM drive reader, a power glitch, whatever. It doesn’t seem likely that the hard disk is really “dead,” just messed up. Before sending it off to the repair shop, I’d suggest a repartition with fdisk and reformat. You can do these things from a DOS command line as long as you can get the win98 bootdisk to work.
Or take Mapo’s frequent suggestion and boot Knoppix, and run cfdisk to repartition, set partition type to:
0C W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Then reformat with:
mkfs -t vfat /dev/hda1
regards,
DB
If its really dead, there are lots of home remedies to try to spin it up
one last time and salvage the data. Look on google, stuff like putting
it in the freezer, or the oven.
Laptop drives are a bit more hassle to resurrect. You could try
SpinRite 6.0 from grc.com if your laptop has a floppy. Maybe
that new SpinRite works from CD too?
You could remove it, stick it in a USB external box (cheap) and
plug that into a desktop system and try to talk to it.
If its really dead, be sure to look up the serial number on the
manufacturer’s web site to see if its still under warranty for
free replacement (of the disk, not your data…).
Thanks for the help everyone. It turns out that I was just not being patient enough. Those are just signs that there are bad sectors in the hd. It took about 2 days to finish formatting and then when i ran scandisk it found some of the bad sectors and fixed them. There’s still some bad sectors that exist but I don’t think that’ll have any real bad effect hopefully. Plus I don’t know how to get rid of them if scandisk can’t find it.
Bad sectors are usually recognized and marked as unusable. You loose some capacity, but no data will be stored in them, thus it shouldn’t cause any trouble.
Bad sectors are sometimes a warning sign of impending doom… if you do another scan disk later and find more bad sectors then you would be safer to replace it.
I had a HD once which presumably got moist from the humidity, the magnetic material on the disk started falling off, once it started going bad it continued at an exponential rate.
Just remember to keep your backup regular. 