Hi,

After 1 year my hd disk apparently died, suddenly some extended partitions formated in ntfs and with data were inaccessible, when I tried to access them a message appear saying that the current partition has no format, as I didn't see another solution to recover my data I tried to format those partitions but the format process failed in every attempt, the next time I turn on my pc I was unable to boot (hd boot failure), so I decided to reinstall the os, I boot on my xp cd and winxp detects the hd perfectly, even more I can delete and recreate the partitions but then when I try to format... the process fail (it freezes at 0%).

The HD is well detected in the bios and by xp during the installation process but then I can't format. This happened to me with a previous hd in the same mobo. My questions are:

- where is the problem? could be the hd, the mobo, the psu maybe?
- there is any way to test the well function of the ide controller?

I tried connecting another hd and it works fine, but also my two previous ruined hard drives worked fine in the begining and then died

Damaged hard disk:
Western digital WD600BB ATA100 7200rpm 60GB
Western digital WD800BB ATA100 7200rpm 80GB

(both HD worked fine for a year)

These are the voltages, temperatures an cooling data according to the bios:

+5v: 5.030v
-5v: 5.077v
+12v: 12.228v
-12v: 11.989v
3.3v: 3.44v
+5v SB: 5.066v

CPU temperature: 30°C
System temperature: 32°C
CPU fan speed: 5367rpm (thermaltake volcano 9)

The motherboard is an MSI KT6 delta with an athlon XP 2400+ (2.0Ghz) and 256 Mb of kingston memory DDR 333mhz.

Thanks in advance for any help
Ryo

Hi Ryo94, welcome to SAF

Go HERE and download the Western Digital Diagnostic Bootdisk Maker Program, follow the instructions of how to make the bootdisk and then start with this disk in the Floppy Drive (assuming the FDD is selected in the boot sequence before the hard drive), perform the Quick Test & Extended Test on the problematic drive and let us know what the diagnostics tell you.

Thanks for reply Alfons, I run both test, the quick test was done but the extended test has been running for more than 3hours and displays a remaining time of 1111h 01m 49s , is this normal? (I mean maybe is trying to fix an irreparable unknown error)

This was the result in the quick test:

CODE

Test completed with unknown element failure Error/Status code: 0004 Test duration: 0 min 9 sec

This aplications has an option called "write zeros to drive", is this a low format method? should I use it?

Thanks for your help

Well, after 5 hours running the extended test and to see a remaining time of 1259 hours I decide to abort the test, plus, now I can't run the diagnostic program anymore, the pc boot on the floopy disk but instead run the application now appears this message:

CODE

Busy Timeout Error/Status code: 0134

I tried reseting the bios to the default values, clearing the cmos using the jumper and also changing the hd from IDE1 to IDE2 but the problem persist.

Any idea of what can be happening?