7 replies to this topic

[nails]

I was playing with an external 500Gig Maxtor Basics drive...

The guy in question went on to explain that the NTFS external drive he had, was no good for his PS3 and he wanted it changed to the older fat32 filesystem. No problem i said.... From within vista, i selected the format option with the fat option and clicked..

that was the last of the drive as we both knew it

i opened the box to reveal a seagate baracuda 7200.11 500 gigabytes, i took the drive out and connected it to my tower running xp and w7 with the seatools utility from the web site but still to no avail. in early tries the drive was recognised but now nothing comes up.

I knew that low-level foormatting of older drives could kill it, but it must be a safe bet that selecting format with fat32 and a quick option really couldnt kill a 500gig sata drive ?

[Matty.N]

eh?

if this is of any use FAT32 will only go upto 32gb via windows

programs say they'll get round it but i havent saw one that does

[stanmarsh14]

eh?

if this is of any use FAT32 will only go upto 32gb via windows

programs say they'll get round it but i havent saw one that does

Yep, as I found today, on a e-sata setup i've just fitted to one of my towers.

Had to reset it with fdisk via a w98 boot floppy, then use partition magic for the partitioning.

[fruitman69]

Hi,
Dont know if its any help but i have a external WD passport 320Gig on FAT32 as i needed it on that so i can play avi straight to my DVD player via USB.

However i did have to use a seperate utility to format it to FAT32.

[stanmarsh14]

I was playing with an external 500Gig Maxtor Basics drive...

The guy in question went on to explain that the NTFS external drive he had, was no good for his PS3 and he wanted it changed to the older fat32 filesystem. No problem i said.... From within vista, i selected the format option with the fat option and clicked..

that was the last of the drive as we both knew it

i opened the box to reveal a seagate baracuda 7200.11 500 gigabytes, i took the drive out and connected it to my tower running xp and w7 with the seatools utility from the web site but still to no avail. in early tries the drive was recognised but now nothing comes up.

I knew that low-level foormatting of older drives could kill it, but it must be a safe bet that selecting format with fat32 and a quick option really couldnt kill a 500gig sata drive ?

See if you can boot with a w98 floppy (Bootdisk.Com), fdisk > option3 > option 1, and kill everything in sight.

Reboot to desktop with drive attached, and use Partition Magic, to format it to whatever you want.

Think what has happened as it did with me earlier, is the dos file tables get screwed up, to the point not even partition magic would touch it.

I did this earlier, and now everything is working fine.

[Fruity_Goodness]

When a disk gets totally #@#@#@#ated (and I've had a few) I always use the "Maxtor Powermax" or "Maxtor Maxblast" (even if the disk in question isn't Maxtor). It writes 0's over the first 300Mb of disk and any bits of shit that have been put on the disk via any rootkit/virus or whatever gets blitzed. Where a "low level format" has failed to reinvigorate the disk, a Maxtor blast has suceeded. Just thought I'd share that bit of "wisdom". And all my shit's over 5 years old so SATA you betcha, although I should point out I bain't gotta clue what I'm doing.

[nails]

the problem is, the drive spins up yet no program sees the drive there. its like the electrics have blown u when i pressed format.

[youbrokeit]

That'd be one hell of a good format.

The best way to see whether or not the drive has totally died or not are:

1) keep it in the external enclosure, plug it in to the PC (in Windows)
2) RIGHT CLICK on My Computer, then click on Manage.
3) Down the left hand panel, select 'Disk Management'
4) See if the USB drive is there. You can then repartition it / format it.

IF it doesn't show up there (and if it spins up, and electrics are ok), you'll need to connect the drive directly to a motherboard with SATA ports, and check that it detects in the BIOS. If the drive doesn't detect in there, then start up a new business in data removal. People pay a lot of money for that!