I had a major crash, virus caused perhaps. But I decided to reformat to clean everything out. Somehow I now have no partions on my drive so I used fdisk to sort this. It says its "creating primary DOS partion" which is great but as it is "verifying drive integrity" it only gets to 54% complete then stops. After a long while it goes and starts again but doesn't get any further. The hard drive is still wizzing round but nothing happens. Help. Is this a sign of a dying hard drive or is there a away round it. I tried "a:\format C:" but that failed as well. Many Thanks

Hi. It's a bad sign that's for sure... Before you fdisk it again...see if you can open up the case and check the ribbon cable. You may want to replace it before replacing the drive just in case. And do a: fdisk /mbr at command prompt before you fdisk to clear the main boot record. -good luck

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=7002 identify your drive then go to above url and download thier diagnostic utility

hello do scan disk from dos check for bad sectors. next d/l doc memory and test your ram. and you might want to d/l hard drive diagnostic utility and test your hard drive. http://www.fujitsu.ca/download/hard_drive.html http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm http://www.seagate.com/support http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

Love to download hard drive diagnostic utility, but it's a Toshiba drive and I can't find one for this drive...unless anyone else can help Thanks

Read the entire article! http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/formatUtilities-c.html You will want to remove ALL the old partitioning information which may be corrupted and not easily removed with FDISK. You may be able to zero fill the first 2-MB or so of your disk with Nortons DiskEdit or a similar low level editor, then FDISK and reboot before formatting the new partitions. If that does not work, get a new drive that has low level utilities available for it! 808