Strange

[Alex123]

Hi everybody!

I have experienced a strange situation with a Western Digital Hard Drive, 100GB.

This is not my main computer.

What happened was that this computer was too slow and full of crapware!

I decided to make a backup and re-install everything.

Once I did that, I run a utility that I always use, dos based, DELPART.EXE. It is supposed to show you all partition the drive has, no matter what type are they, FAT, FAT32, NTFS, etc.

It is not the fist time that I use that utility and I know people here who have used it, know is safe to use it.

After I erased the partitions, I used the boot disks of Partition magic to re-design the Hard Drive. It showed up the full amount of space in the hard drive and no problem partitioning and formatting it. I am familiar with this utility as well, it save a lot of time compared to FDISK.

The strange thing is that when I tried to install the operating system, windows xp professional, it gets to a point that says, there is no hard drive found.
More strange still is, I installed xp in this system a while ago, using exactly the same procedure with no problems.

The hard drive is recognized at its full capacity in POST, but not when xp checks for it when installing.

After running the manufacturer's diagnostic utility, it comes with an error message. "error 0007". When I check in their website for the meaning of it, it just says the hard drive has to be replaced.

I understand then, the hard drive is gone!

My concern here is, why a hard drive suddenly dies, if it was working before it was erased. I don't think erasing a hard drive can cause a hardware failure.
Or it's just a huge coincidence that exactly when I erased it the hard drive failed mechanically?

What do you think?

Alex123

[Cricket]

Try another IDE cable before replacing the hard drive.

If the hard drive is indeed broken, it may just be coincidence and not from running Delpart and Partition Magic.

Cricket

[reboot]

I would run fdisk on it anyhow. Create a primary partition the size you want, make it active, and install Windows.
Then install PM, and make any other partitions you want.
Another reason this may happen is if the BIOS anti-virus is active, or the hard drive was disabled in BIOS to get the machine to boot from CD...common in Asus boards especially.