hey everyone...i found an old computer and hard drive, and all the cables and stuff for it while i was cleanin out the attic, its a Compaq, thats all i kno since i dont have the case for it, and i cant find on the board any model number, i think the processor is 300mhz, its a socket 7...

so i wanted to use it as a second computer, i tried to format the hard drive, i got a boot disk, and it boots up...it gets to 100% or about it and says Format Terminated...i tried fdisk (deleted partition then made new one) and tried again, still said tht...

i tried scandisk, it says "scandisk cannot examine drive c"...i tried low level formatting, it did the same thing, it got to 100% or close to 100% and came up with error...i tried to use a different boot disk on a brand new disk...

scandisk still says it cannont examine it, and format still says its terminated...and while its formatting, it comes up with "trying to recover alloacation unit" like alot after it gets past like 85%completed...and when it says the recover allocation thing, the hard drive sounds like a thumping noise or something, like the hdd reader inside going back and forth, it kinda sounds like a floppy drive when its reading a floppy...but i only hear it when it comes up with the recovering alloacation unit...

i also went to western digitals site to use config/utily program they had on their, but it wont work for my hdd, since its old

does anyone kno how i can fix this? or is the drive completly gone and totally cannont be fixed?

HARD DRIVE INFO:
Western Digital
Caviar 2540
1048cyl * 16heads * 63spt * 540.8MB
SN:7001292451
MDL: WDAC2540-00H
P/N: 99-004137-000
CCC: A1`12 OCT 94
DCM: EAMAAAAA
Made in Singapore

it says "WDC copyright 1993" on the back

fdisk at 80% and leave the 20% unallocated. In this way you still can use about 400Mb.
That's the way to use the HDD when you got bad sectors.

Waste of time and effort. It's toast.

I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

http://www.killdisk.com

...this will totally wipe the drive.

To add to what Milky Way said, run fdisk and remove the existing partitions. Then choose option 1 to create the partition. When it asks if you want to use all the existing space, answer No. Then it'll ask how much space to allocate to that partition. Enter 80% or a percentage less than when the problems start showing when formatting.

You mentioned you low level formatted it. A good LLF utility for a small drive like that is MAXLLF. A google search should turn up a download for it.