Need Help with Hard Drive Problem Hello I have been having a problem with one of my hard drives. I built my PC myself, its a Duron 850 CPU, with 512 Megs Ram Mother Board is an Asus Via KT133. It used to be a Dual Boot system with Windows XP on the Slave Hard Drive (Maxtor 15 Gigs) and ME on the Master Hard Drive (Maxtor 40 Gigs divided into 3 partitions) 1st being for the ME operating system FAT32 and the other 2 partitions were formatted in NTFS where I kept all my Setup programs and private folders. Only reason I had Windows ME was so that my CD Burner can function. Later on my Cd-Burner was good for the garbage. So I decided to remove ME to run only Windows XP only. I had unplugged my parallel cable and power to the hard drive containing the Windows XP to be on the safe side. Afterwards I inserted a floppy disk so that I can run Fdisk to format the hard drive containing the Windows ME. As we all know you cannot see the NTFS partitions in DOS. So I decide to run Fdisk and format my C: partition to get rid of Windows ME everything was working fine until I reached 100% of the format being finished only to get a warning that it cannot be formatted. I had done this many times and never had any problems. So I thought perhaps I did something wrong, and decided to format that partition again only to get same result, which I found to be strange. So I booted up my comp using that hard drive and it tells me no operating system on it. So I figured I will try a different method. What I did was set that hard drive as Slave, and plugged the parallel cable and power to my other hard drive and reinstalled Window XP on it since the other Drive contained the dual boot for ME and XP. Once XP was installed I figured it will be easier for me to see the other hard drive and just use XP to format the partition that had ME. Surprise surprise, when I rebooted my computer it detected the Master drive and it usually would say Maxtor 51536H2 which is my hard drives model number and it would also detect the Salve hard drive saying Maxtor Millennium which is very odd cause I never label my hard drives at all. usually that hard drive would be seen as Maxtor 919 can't remember rest of model number. Anyways the booting processes continues when suddenly I get this message "PRIMARY SLAVE FAILS". PRESS F1 to continue, DEL to enter setup. (bios setup) which I have done to make sure my setting were correct. BUT when I pressed on F1 to continue to boot my Slave Hard Drive was no longer seen in the booting procedure nor was it seen in Win XP. So I decided to use Maxtor Maxblast to format my Salve's 1st partition, it' couldn't detect my Slave hard drive after repeated attempts. So I try using Partition Magic 6 that too couldn't detect my hard drive. Finally I use IBM Disk Manager and I get same result cannot detect my Slave hard drive. I had also used Norton's disk utility with no result. I had called Maxtor since my warranty is good till May 2003 they had asked me a few questions and since in the first part of the booting my hard drive is detected I was told by Maxtor that it is a software related problem. I had gone to see a data recovery company and these people wanted to charge me $100 estimation fee to say if my drive is good or not, and if the data can be recovered it will cost between $300 and $2000 depending on the procedure they use. Needless to say at that price I am sure you guys can actually think what was going through my mind at $2000 I can build another PC or buy many hard drives for that price. My data is valuable but certainly not at those prices. So I was checking on the internet if someone has the same problems or has some kind of trick I can do to bypass my bios so that I can get inside that hard drive and delete whatever it is that causing all this problem. I also read about this Spinrite 5.0 from GRC's Steve Gibson was considering to buy it but, I have already bought Partion Magic 6 and Norton Disk Utilities and it didn't work. ( Not to mention that maxBlast and IBM disk manager failed also.) So it is why I am now pessimistic of paying for SpinRite cause am worried I would just throw more money down the drain only to get same results. So I wanted to know if anyone has SpinRite 5.0 here, and if so could you please e-mail me a copy of it.

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You can't format the C: drive because that's where you boot sector is. That's what is giving you the problem. From XP you can convert the C: drive to NTFS which will wipe out ME. Good luck.

Hi Brown1955 My main problem is when I turn on my computer on the boot up (Black Screen) it will detect Primary master as Maxtor 51536H2 which is the model number. It will detect Primary Slave as Maxtor: Millennium inseat of using that hard drives model number which I find very strange. During the bootup after it had detected the primary Slave hard drive I will receive the following massage: "PRIMARY SLAVE FAILS" "PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE, DEL TO ENTER SETUP (BIOS SETUP) if I press on F1 my Primary Slave is no longer detected. I now have used Maxtor's MaxBlast with it's Powermax utility, Partition Magic 6, Norton Disk Doctor, IBM Disk Manager and a gentleman who was nice enough to send me a copy of SpinRite 5.0, and I have tried various downloads from the internet and all so far have failed to even locate my hard drive. So at this point I am at a loss and have no idea what else i can do or if someone has a trick to solve this problem. As I have said I did call Maxtor for technical support since my hard drive is still on warranty till May 2003, figuring they would replace my hard drive and transfer whatever was on the old to the new one, but they said since the boot up can detect the drive, it is not the hard drive that's corrupted but more of a software problem.

The Master Boot Record (MBR) may be messed up. I remember reading from a few days back on this forum on how to fix it up with XP's repair function, but I can't remember exactly how it goes. Fdisk /mbr will also do it. I have also used the Linux partition program to get out of a similar situation. However it is quite complicated and very dangerous if there is any data to be saved on the sick drive. The Old Tech.

John, I have read your post several times and I think I know what has gone awry. Had a Fujitsu 6GB that got hit with a power bump during a format. Same as yours, it had no model number. Only the Western Digital utilities could see what model it was, but could do nothing with it. After I got Spinrite, it also recognized the model nbr correctly and informed me that the drive was messed up and could not continue. Running Spinrite somehow set the firmware on the drive back into operation and once again made the drive visible. Running fdisk showed what had happened. The drive had ended up with two partitions adding up to 10GB, exceeding its capacity. The firmware on the drive got confused, and for all intents and purposes vanished. If Spinrite has not reset the firmware on yours, I have no idea where you go from here. Hope this helps out, The Old Tech.