Hard drive formatting Question

[Tony Starks]

Ok I got this hard drive from a friend. He had Win ME on it, and his computer had a hard time booting up saying things like Hard drive failure and sometimes it will boot most times it wont so on and so on. i tried installing XP on it but while formating it said can not format drive. After a couple of tries he bought a new drive and then gave me the old one. I hooked it up in my computer windows Xp reads it but when I try to open it it tells me to format drive which is fine. I hit start and after half way through it give me the same message that I can not format. It will be a waste to throw this free 60GB drive in the trash. Is there another way I can format this drive? How about a nice big magnet to the drive ? I plan on loading Linux on this drive. Thanks

[Panama Red]

I managed to "save" an 80Gb Western Digital a while back by first testing it at WD site with the online diagnostics and after confirming it was ok, I had to use Partition Magic to format. XP wouldn't do it. If I remember correctly, I used the WD utility to write all zeros to the drive first before the reformat. Here's a link to the WD diagnostics. It will work with any brand of hard drive. Good luck.

http://support.wdc.com/dlg/onlinedlg.asp