Cant format hard drive...Please Help

[imported_ritesh]

I have a laptop - HP OmniBook 4150 with a 1G IBM hard drive.
Short Story:
I cant format hard drive from MS DOS, when i try to i get message:
" Trying to recover allocation unit 2155 and increments in number and goes in loop.

I have tried delpart and when saving after deletion of partition it gives message "error writing to partition table" and when i try FDISK to create new partition after deleting existing one it gives "checking drive integrity" and hangs so i cant format drive.

Long Story: I had Win98 on this laptop and all of a sudden it came up upon booting "corrupted himem.sys. So i tried formatting from DOS and it went ok first time and then when i ran Win 98 setup from CD it came with message, cannot update hard disk. Running scandisk for C: gives tick for all sections but when goes to do surface scan gives "Run Time Error: R6003" and hangs.

Now i can access C drive ok from DOS. Of course theres nothing on it currently. Even when trying to create a directory from DOS it gives message"your program caused a divide overflow error"

Has any bod got any ides. Is this hard drive gone kaput or some virus etc...i have tried so many forums/hp site but no luck. Any Geniuses out there..please help!!

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, I have a 4 gig drive from a Toshiba Laptop that acts somewhat like that. It will Fdisk ok, but on Format after about 10% is done it begins to give the "Trying to recover etc" message. It will then run for what what seems like days trying to recover and marking bad ones. Seems that the brain that wrote Format told it to try 300 times or more on each sector. That drive is definitely bad. I cannot recover it. It does the same thing using Maxblast and then Scandisk. Maxblast does not check for bad sectors, but scandisk does. Hope this helps, Jim

 

[airfoil]

I'd say the drive is probably shot. You could try Fdisk and also the drive manufacturers partition utility as well.