FDISK issue

[Karthik1019]

Hi everyone. Here's the problem. I found an old harddrive in a closet in my house the other day. If I recall correctly, it came out of an old Gateway P5-75 that I had when I was 5, really, the second computer I ever used. Well, I was bored, so I decided to put it into my 6 year old Win98se Dell, just for fun I guess. It didn't show up in My Computer, so I ran fdisk, it said there were no partitions, but it recognized the drive and its stats and all. So I tried to create a primary DOS partition and it went to its little "verifying drive integrity" or whatever its called, and it kinda just stayed at 0%. The problem may just be my patience level, but I waited for many minutes and nothing happend. There was no noise coming from the case other than its fan. The hard drive light wasn't blinking. Is the drive just old and shot, or is there something else going on here? Thanks, I seem to have a problem with writing really long posts to explain simple problems....

[glc]

Download the diagnostics from the hard drive manufacturer and run them.

[Karthik1019]

I found a general "old hard drives" diagnostic at the WD website, and it told me that there was a write error, said it was unrecoverable, and terminated the program. I guess that's the end then. The drive seems to be slowing down my system and making it unstable too, so I guess I need to take it out. It's strange, the reading seems fine, the computer knows the size of the drive, and the drive even sputters a little at startup. That was short lived, but at least it kept me occupied for a day.