FDISK DOESN’T CLEAN SOME HARD DRIVES COMPLETELY
(New content 6/16/02)
Larry Brink of Wisconsin has pointed out, in the recent thread New Computer & Setup Win XP, that there is an issue running FDisk on hard drives originating in some HP computers. Incredibly, FDisk doesn’t really wipe them clean. Larry had to use a punchier disk utility to clean his hard drive adequately for reuse. (This issue isn’t limited to HP computers, but this is the particular hardware on which the issue appeared.)
While the entire thread may be interesting reading because of the various possibilities that were explored (in vain) while attempting to solve his problem, it was Larry himself (a technical support specialist in Wisconsin) who solved it. Here is his story: Larry built his first computer from the bottom up, with some great hardware. All of the hardware was brand new — except the hard drive, which he pulled out of an HP Pavilion where it was working just fine. When he tried to install Windows XP on the finished computer, he got the error message,
An unexpected error (0) occured at line 1768 in d:\xpclient\base\boot\setup\arcdisp.c. When he tried to install Windows 98 on it instead, he got the error message, KERNAL: unable to initialize heap. Several possible causes were ruled out, such as establishing that the CDs were both just fine.
Larry began to suspect the hard drive was the problem — especially since it was the only part that was completely new. He learned that booting from a Win98 startup diskette and running FDisk on this drive really wasn’t preparing the disk adequately. He borrowed a copy of Maxtor’s MaxBlast Plus utility from a friend and used this to prep the hard drive and, as he wrote, “Bang, I now have Win XP installed on my new machine, running with no problems at all.”
Thanks to Larry for sharing this with us on the forum. It’s great when people come back to explain what finally solved their computer problems!
Installation error
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