potential creative challenge for you all: can't format C drive after erasing it

[ragamoffyn]

All,

Apologies in advance for the long message. I wanted to provide all the detail that I could. The basic problem is that I'm unable to format my C: drive after erasing it. Here's the background:

I have a Dell XPS 2 with two 250GB hard drives. (Other specs are listed below.) I got it in 2003, I think. I want to sell it, so in preparation, I tried to clean and format the hard drives. I used Darik's Boot and Nuke to do the job. The cleaning went fine until the end, when I got a message saying the process was complete but there had been some non-fatal errors because of some bad sectors.

I couldn't boot up the computer afterward, of course, because I forgot to make a boot up disk. I tried using the Windows XP installation CD, but all I got when restarting the computer was a "press F1 to retry, F2 to setup" message. I can enter the BIOS, and I put the CD-player at the top of the boot disk, but no good.

My concern is that my "secondary master drive", according to the BIOS, is listed as "Samsung CD-R/RW SW-252S ! ! !", and the exclamation points make me think that the CD drive isn't working and hence cannot be used to boot. (Before I erased Windows, the OS was not recognizing the drive for some reason.) My "secondary slave drive" works, though.

Anyway, I don't have much access to another computer with a floppy drive, but I managed to obtain a boot disk, so I can get to the A: prompt now. And I also got my hands on FDISK and FORMAT from FreeDOS or whatever. FDISK seemed to go OK: I created 1 FAT32 primary DOS partition on each hard drive. After restarting, I tried FORMAT, but after hitting "Y", I got this message: "Fatal error writing setting disk access flags...format terminated. Error Code: 05". I searched this forum and found that other people have encountered that message, but unfortunately I didn't understand the replies...

Also, after partitioning the hard drives, I now get this message when trying to boot from the CD (or just from the hard drive): "partition signature != 55AA".

And now I'm at a loss. Because I don't have convenient access to a floppy drive, and because I'm not sure my CD drive is working correctly, I'm hoping someone might be able to suggest a solution that involves use of a USB flash drive. A google search showed me that such things were possible, but the solutions were a little beyond my tech skills.

The only other piece of info I can offer is that attempting to DIR the C: drive gives me an "invalid media" message.

Sorry for the long message, but reading some of the posts here showed me that details are preferred.

Here are my computer specs.

Dell Dimension XPS Gen 2
Two Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz processors
Two 512Mb memory sticks
Raid 0 Volume 465.6Gb hard drive (2 drives)
RADEON 9800 XT 256Mb video card
RADEON 9800 XT - Secondary 256Mb video card
USB Audio Device
Creative Audigy Audio Processor (WDM)
Microsoft Windows XP Pro
BIOS: Dell Computer Corporation, version A06, 09-27-04
Standard floppy disk drives
Intel(R) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D2
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D4
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D7
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24DE
Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller

Thanks very much in advance for any help.
Mike

[demosthanese]

Well it looks like you just have some bad sectors on the ole harddrive so it didnt quite finish the format. My guess would be that the bad sectors were on your MBR, so its still thinking there is something to boot there. First, take out the secondary HDD. It simplifies things and you can just nuke it with whatever utility you like. I suggest www.ubcd4win.com utility set. It has a fantastic boot cd utility, comes with everything you would ever need, including memtest, hardware testing etc, and its all in a friendly, windows-like GUI (OMG!) interface! Once you get that, you might also want to get SeaGate's HDD zero utility. It doesn't format the drive, it writes zeroes to the whole thing, so it takes longer but it nukes it down to factory cleanliness. I suggest Seagate first, then UBCD4win, as its a little simpler. After you get the first drive zeroed out, reformat it into NTFS, which is the XP format (FAT32 stopped being used on winME).

Then use your windows install cd as you normally would. You should have gotten atleast 1 restore cd from Dell. After you get that up and running, zero the second HDD and add it like you would any new hardware.

Hope this help.

Also, if your mobo supports USB boot, it will be in the BIOS settings as a bootable device, but being that its a DELL i doubt it will.

[glc]

Have you recreated the RAID array in the bios since nuking the 2 drives?

One of the drives may have bad sectors, you need to run some kind of diags on both drives one at a time to see.