Hard drive woes

[darkweb4 at totalmail.com]

It sounds like your drive is scrambled.  Take it out of the machine and bang the end with the 
connections on some hard surface.  This will shake all the bits down towards the interface of the 
drive.  Then put the drive back in the machine, and if it doesn't work then, call WD up and ask 
them for a new drive, it must be defective.  <snickers> ;)

sorry about the misinformation, I, uh, had an interesting evening after the LUG.

Now I will attempt to give a real answer (uh, 42!).  You might try downloading the disk utilities 
from WD's website.  One of those utilities should make a bootable floppy that will run diagnostics 
and has a few other utilities on it.  It might be worth your time to try that, but I can't promise 
anything.  There is some kind of program that should come on that floppy that will let you "low 
level format/ zero write" the drive (not a real low level format, but that's what they call it 
anyway)... I'm shooting at crows here, so that may not be a good fix.  But, you're going to wipe 
the drive anyways, right? :)

Second Idea:  If the first idea leads nowhere, and the drive is still under warrenty...call WD up 
and try and troubleshoot over the phone.  They will probably want to blame the BIOS, so you might 
want to check with the BIOS manufactuer first.  If neither company can fix it, and you are SURE 
that reflashing the BIOS won't improve your situation, you MIGHT be able to get a new (cough, 
referbished and recertified, cough) drive from WD.

Sorry if none of this is helpful, but this is the best I can do without more research.  I can also 
comiserate with you.  I had a sweeeet 80 gig WD caviar drive that died completly in less than a 
year.  Total Hardware Failure.  I lost all my goodies! :'(    (that's when i became really anal 
about backups)

Hope that this helped a little, and good luck

--- Kurt Kessler <kessler2k at yahoo.com> wrote:
>I have a 30GB Western Digital drive that does not want
>to seem to format. I have tried to fdisk it several
>times, to no avail. I finally have a bit of time, so I
>just decided to try and install linux on it to kill
>anything that may be on it, and perhaps fix this
>problem. My bios (which is current) sees it half of
>the time.. (yes, sometimes it do, and sometimes it do
>not) I put in my RH 8 cd and booted, its going through
>everything just fine, untill its time to
>partition/format the drive. It tells me that it is an
>"invalid file system" and asks if i want to retry or
>abort. I clicked retry several times, then it says
>"the disk is not initialized" and asks me if I would
>like to initialize it. I click yes, and then get "An
>error has occured, no valid decvices were found on
>which to create new file systems. Please check your
>hardware for the cause of this problem"
>
>So what in the hell can I do to fix this??? I can only
>boot into windoze if this drive is set as a slave, and
>even then, I cannot read or write to the disk. Fdisk
>will NOT view the drive. However, windows will show it
>as having a 23GB partition and a WIN98 directory on
>it. Im lost here... Any help will be GREATLY
>appreciated.
>
>Kurt
>
>=====
>32 bit extensions and a graphical
>shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system
>originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written
>by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
>
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