Raw Hard drive. Format and diskpart fails.

[cheezstik]

Really long thread but please read it and help.

Today i got sick of my hard drive always uselessly disappearing and thought i'd rather lose 150gbs of data then have it become useless all the time. I tried to fix my disappearing in this thread but had no success. After all that i tried formatting it. It said it was formatting for a couple of minutes then stopped and it froze up so i had to exit it. The usual blue bar that appears under storage devices and tells you how much memory it has left disappeared and i tried to double click it then it froze explorer, leading to me terminating and restarting it and when i restarted it disappeared.

When I restart my computer, sometimes it shows up and sometimes it doesnt, but it always shows up in my bios. I tried booting from windows 7 install disk and installing windows 7 directly to the disk but it couldn't see the disk. When i right click it and go into it's properties while it's invisible, it says file format is raw.

When my hard drive visible, i try to format it with cmd or with right click but it always fails and disappears after failure. When it isn't visible, the only thing that can detect it that i know of is diskpart in cmd. It doesnt even show up in device manager. With diskpart, i tried selecting it as a disk and cleaning it but it fails and says ' DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified. See the System Event Log for more information.' When i select it as a volume and try to format it using the command 'format fs=ntfs quick' or 'format fs=ntfs' it doesnt work either.

The disk is connected to my MOBO via sata cable and it's a seagate barracuda 7200.5 200gb and currently my d drive when visible. Please help - the hard drive I'm using now is only 80gb and i plan on cloning it to the 200gb one when it gets fixed so i can boot it from that one.

 

[seavixen32]

Before you can format a raw hard drive you must create a partition on it first.

Go to Start>Control Panel>System & Security>Admin Tools>Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions.

Select the raw drive/partition then right-click and choose Delete Volume.

Right-click it again and create a new partition, allocate a drive letter and choose the Quick Format option.

 

[Britton30]

Hi cheezstik, I read your other thread. Did you run | Seagate Seatools on the drive yet? Certainly sounds like it's dying.
There is an option for running in DOS without have to boot to Windows. Do you have the latching SATA cable as suggested?

 

[cheezstik]

Yes i have a latching cable. Seaxiven32, when i try to delete volume, it says could not find the file specified. Formatting fails aswell. The only thing that works is asigning letters, which is pretty useless when it doesnt work.

And also, my electricity stopped while trying to fix my hdd and when i turned it back on my hard drive was completely invisible. Even in diskpart.

 

[Britton30]

I just looked at your screenshot. You didn't enter the right commands, after selecting the disk it should be clean all . The format command is format fs=ntfs quick , you have a space between fs and =. Maybe this will help.

 

[theog]

Do not use Clean ALL, As windows 7 is booting from Disk0.

 

[cheezstik]

Actually, Windows isn't booting from disk 0. That's just my D drive that I have all my data on.

 

[cheezstik]

I just looked at your screenshot. You didn't enter the right commands, after selecting the disk it should be clean all . The format command is format fs=ntfs quick , you have a space between fs and =. Maybe this will help.

hey britton30, thanks for your help but unfortunately it didn't work. I tried using your commands but it gave me the same outcome. Any idea on what i could do now??

 

[cheezstik]

Before you can format a raw hard drive you must create a partition on it first.

Go to Start>Control Panel>System & Security>Admin Tools>Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions.

Select the raw drive/partition then right-click and choose Delete Volume.

Right-click it again and create a new partition, allocate a drive letter and choose the Quick Format option.

Hey seaxiven32, thanks for your help but it didn't work. I tried deleting volume but it says could not find the file specified. So i tried skipping that step and going straight to formatting it. That doesnt work either. It says format was not completed succesfully. Any idea on what i could do next?

 

[karlsnooks]

Run Seagate Tools as suggested to you by Britton30.

 

[cheezstik]

Run Seagate Tools as suggested to you by Britton30.

Hey karlsnooks i tried but it disappears as soon as i run seatools. It probably wouldn't report anything bad anyway as windows says it's online and working fine. Ill reboot my computer and try to catch it without it disappearing a couple times.

edit: Damn, the hard drive keeps disappearing! Sometimes after boot it's there sometimes it's not. Sometimes it doesnt even show up in diskpart. This hard drive can't be dead because in bios it always shows up. When i used to dual-boot (or whatever it's called) xp it never disappeared in xp. It was perfect in xp. But when i loaded up windows 7 every 10 minutes or so it disappeared. I removed xp and still have the issue. This hard drive was from a prebuilt computer that was bought in 2005 and that computer ran xp. Maybe this hard drive only decently works with xp. So now all i need is a way to force format this hard drive.

 

[seavixen32]

It sounds as though the drive has compatibility issues with Windows 7, particularly as it worked with XP.

Either that or the drive has given up the ghost.

 

[theog]

A Hd can show BIOS when it is going down.

Can you post a screen shot of Disk management?
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-how-post-screenshot-seven-forums.html

Screenshot tools.
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-...ed-method-uploading-posting-screen-shots.html
How to Use the Snipping Tool in Vista - Vista Forums
Snipping Tool - Windows 7 features - Microsoft Windows
Use Snipping Tool to capture screen shots
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9717-screenshot-paint.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/51160-screenshot-upload-using-mwsnap.html
fscapture free download

Use Snipping Tool to capture screen shots

 

[karlsnooks]

cheezstik,

Seagate





Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.


I believe this one following can be put on a cd so that you can boot from the cd. It works with Seagate.

Hitachi Drive Fitness Test
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/downloads/dft32_v416_b00.iso

 

[cheezstik]

A Hd can show BIOS when it is going down.

Can you post a screen shot of Disk management?
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-how-post-screenshot-seven-forums.html

Screenshot tools.
http://www.sevenforums.com/general-...ed-method-uploading-posting-screen-shots.html
How to Use the Snipping Tool in Vista - Vista Forums
Snipping Tool - Windows 7 features - Microsoft Windows
Use Snipping Tool to capture screen shots
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9717-screenshot-paint.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/51160-screenshot-upload-using-mwsnap.html
fscapture free download

Use Snipping Tool to capture screen shots

Hey, I cant see it anymore from disk management. Anything that uses D drive seems to make it disappear. I will try karlsnooks solution.