i got a wd5000aaks (500gb) in an icydock mb559us-1b enclosure.

i formatted it NTFS and everything was fine and happy.

enter my girlfriend's mac. (osx 10.4)

I downloaded ntfs-3g (link: www.ntfs-3g.org) in order to be able to write to the NTFS drive via the USB connection on her computer (We wanted to back up her pictures).

while copying, it suddenly stopped, the drive disappeared from her desktop and the copying stopped.

I unplugged the drive and plugged it back in. it appeared on her desktop, but now was labelled 'Megan HDD 2' instead of 'Megan HDD'. I opened the drive and nearly all the data was gone.

i plugged it back into my computer and used Stellar Phoenix to recover the data, successfully.

when I tried to reformat the drive to start anew, it just hung at 3%.

I tried a quickformat, which simply produced the error "The format did not complete successfully"

I tried deleting the partition, and making a new partition... no help.

I tried wiping the drive with killdisk, and it simply stalled at 0%.

any suggestions?

-a

Beg or borrow a retail disk of XP, the same type (Home, Pro or Corporate) and boot with it from the DVD. Even burn a copy from a friend. I think M/Soft will sell you one for $10 or so, as long as you are the registered owner of the license. When it asks for the key number, enter YOURS, not the one that came with the disk. Choose the new install, not any of the repair options offered. When the partition/format screen appears, REMOVE all partitions creating total-raw space on the disk. Then create a new partition encompassing the entire disk (if you want a single partition). That will totally erase everything on the drive. Then format in NTFS and reinstall XP. Depending on the age of your computer, you may want to go to your manufacturer's website and download the mainboard (chipset) drivers and install them after XP is up and running.

I have a retail disk of XP *somewhere*.. but before I dig it up, why would I install it on my external? my system drive works fine, it's the 500gb external that I connect via USB or eSATA that needs fixing.

I currently don't have XP installed on it, nor does it seem at all necessary or even possible (can you boot from a usb drive?)

-f

Sorry, man, I didn't pickup on that this was an external drive, just automatically assumed it was your internal C drive. Guess my brain wasn't in gear at that instant.

Okay, try to remove the partition in Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management (be careful, don't choose your C drive!). If you can remove the partition, then format it and that should do the trick. It's not necessary to install XP, of course.

If no go, use your XP disk as I described. After the partition is removed you are home free, go into Disk Management and format in NTFS.

If neither of those methods work, send me a PM with your email address and I will send you a 0-out utility that will write 0s to your entire hard drive in about 15 seconds and works outside of XP-you boot with it from your A drive. If you don't have an A drive, burn it to a CD and boot from the CD with it. It was free and created by Samsung, but isn't available any more, for some reason they took it off their website. But I use it all the time.

I sent you a PM... did you get it?

-f

Yes, I replied to your link and attached clearhdd. Did you receive it?

nope... I'll pm you my email address again (maybe I misspelled it)

For all viewers: fitzarthenon has the utility clearhdd, by Samsung.

First, detach the power cable from your main C drive, thus disabling it. This is for safety; clearhdd was created in the days of DOS, and it automatically will hunt for the C drive unless otherwise instructed.

Okay, either boot from the DVD drive or the floppy, you will have to set your BIOS to boot from which ever drive you choose. Have your external disk plugged in.

This is where it gets a bit tricky. I used to have clearhdd loaded on a Windows 98 boot floppy; then it started giving me problems loading. So.... I have clearhdd on one floppy, and Win98 boot disk on another. Boot from Win98 boot disk and when it finishes loading and you have the blinking DOS prompt, eject that disk and insert the floppy containing Clearhdd. Now type: clearhdd 0.exe (don't forget the space after clearhdd) and press enter. It will ask you two times if you really want to do this, press Y two times and in about 15 seconds your drive will be reduced to 0's.

The other command is: clearhdd 1.exe, and that will nuke any slave drive. I have never tried this with a USB external drive, so you may have to "play around" with it a bit. If there were a way to directly slave the external to your IDE cable I could guarantee this would work, but this is the best I can offer.

Again, you didn't mention if you tried the XP system disk or not, but it is also a viable option.

If you could post where you downloaded clearhdd I would appreciate it, I have been unable to find it on the Samsung website.

If this doesn't work, there may be other 0-out utilities out there that will work with an external drive. I wish you the best! Let us know what happens, it will help me give proper advice to a poster if this situation arises again.

i found clearhdd.exe (11kb) by typing clearhdd into google and hitting "i'm feeling lucky" (no joke)

here's the link:

http://files.filefront.com/ClearHDDzip/;53...;/fileinfo.html

as far as pulling the plug on my c drive, I have no idea how to do that on my laptop. it's an asus z33a.

also, some new developements.

I just found my xp install disk, but haven't tried it yet.

I also found a diagnostic utility by western digital here:

http://support.wdc.com/download/windlg/windlg.zip

the harddrive failed its scan because it has 'too many bad sectors' at right around the 33million mark (on a harddrive w/ 978 million sectors), which is right about 3% into the drive.

I'm currently using Dmitriy Primochenko's HDD regenerator 1.51 (not freeware) to try to fix the bad sectors to no avail (I used it on my system disk when it got all screwey and it actually managed to recover all the bad sectors).

with the external it started finding bad sectors at 33982835 and has already found 22 in a row (and counting), and hasn't been able to recover any of them.

I don't know what could have happened to the drive?!?!

an interesting side note. the western digital utility also has a zero out feature, but it failed.

also, when I tried to run the diagnostic scan with the drive plugged in via my eSATA PCMCIA card, it froze the whole computer (consistently) where even the cursor was unresponsive, but it worked fine when I ran it with the drive plugged in via a USB cable.. (the scan just failed at the 3398XXXX). any ideas why this might be? is my eSATA card faulty?

thanks again for all your help

-f

It's beginning to sound like your hard drive went south. When there are suddenly that many disk errors, its not a good sign.

I agree...

I already contacted the site I bought it from and they agreed to send out a replacement as soon as they get this one back.

thanks for all your help