Trying to reformat HD (WD 2.1G), was once Linux native. Fdisk under DOS boot flop went smoothly, no trouble, but the format eventually terminates after trying to recover many allocation units. I've tried format /u, same result--format terminated after 53% & some wasted time. Any ideas? TIA

One possibility is to partition the drive into three partitions, in this case making the first partition about 50% of the drive's space, You could guess and make the second partiton about 20% or so, and put the remainder in a third. Hopefully the mass of bad sectors will be trapped in the second partition, which you could avoid using. (Don't even create a drive in the second partition. Some experimentation may be required. I have successfully done this on a drive that gave me the same problems.

The first 50% or so might be okay, like he said. But once a drive starts developing bad sectors and physical damage, it's all downhill from there. More bad sectors will probably pop up and spread down to the first 50%. So either get Partition Magic and start resizing down more and more as bad sectors appear, or else ditch the hard disk and get a new one.

i had that problem with a 500mb hardrive on my spare computer a 486, the first 100mb was full of bad sectors so made that c: drive and installed windows 95 on to D: it works fine but comes up with the error message one or more of your drives has developed bad sectors and it runs scandisk, but i dont seem to hasve lost and files!!

Go to the hard drive manufacturers website, download thier version of disk manager, run this, this often has a utilty to repair or set flags so bad clusters are invisible by the dos format command so it wont try and format them, it does reduce the size of the hd, i recovered an otherwise unusavble western digital drive this way. Woof

Assuming you do not have totally ruined sectors 1. FDISK with DR-DOS 7.03. It has no porblem the ex UNIX/Linux partitions or 2. Format with MS-DOS FORMAT ver. 4.00. It will erase all the bad sector flags Scandisk has installed. These are often premature and no problem results if SCANDISK does not find them again after the format.