Western Digital problem

[Vette]

Customer brings her computer into the shop and wants it formatted and restored which is all fine and good with me. I ran fdisk, fdisk /mbr, restarted computer and ran fdisk again and partitioned the drive (40 gig) restarted again and ran format C: to install FAT32 and restarted again. Everything went well untill I went to install Win98SE and it said your HDD is not formatted would you like Windows to format it for you and I answered yes and it went through the motions like it was was formatting. When it weas finished I started again and attempted to install Windows again, and the same error came up again. I restarted again and ran fdisk and it showed the format as unknown. I started over and ran fdisk..format..etc. After running format again I didn't restart and ran scandisk /all and it came up with a FAT not matching error and replaced it with a copy of FAT2. I told it to fix the error, rebooted, ran fdisk again and it showed the format as unknown again. I fdisk and formatted again and before rebooting, ran fdsik and it showed up as FAT32, so I ran scandisk through and it showed no disk errors, so I rebooted again and the format went back to unknown again.

I'm running out of ideas now....I've partitioned it in sections, half and half, one big partition,etc...all with the same results after reboot. I suspect the HDD is bad but really have no proof. I've also tried partition magic and other formatters all with the same results after reboot. Needless to say we won't be making any money on this repair job as I have wasted several hours on this job.

[GrandDad]

Why did she want it formated and reinstall to start with ?

[Vette]

Why did she want it formated and reinstall to start with ?

Her son had gotten on it and had installed KaZaa and almost every other program that is loaded with spyware....it would barely boot up. It had over 2300 files found by AdAware and spybot and it was still very slow.

[TripleRLtd]

Try WDDiag from WD to test the drive before trying anything else.
Does the Bios report the drive properly, btw?

[TripleRLtd]

Her son had gotten on it and had installed KaZaa and almost every other program that is loaded with spyware....it would barely boot up. It had over 2300 files found by AdAware and spybot and it was still very slow.

Ah, also do a virus scan which tests memory, etc...

[Vette]

Yes the BIOS reports the HDD correctly. I'll download WDDiag and run it in the morning. Is there an antivirus that will work on a computer that has no OS installed on it?

[NooNoo]

Vette, it has to have some sort of OS - without it, software cannot run.

If there is no data on the drive, wd diags should offer a zero fill (lowlevel format) utility. This will obliterate all data on the drive, including viruses.

[TechZ]

Just an idea, but why not put the hdd in another pc to see what the problems is, u can diagnose it much more easily.

[TripleRLtd]

Yes the BIOS reports the HDD correctly. I'll download WDDiag and run it in the morning. Is there an antivirus that will work on a computer that has no OS installed on it?

A prior AV rescue disk set on floppy, properly write protected, will detect a memory resident virus, as will an AV cd which is bootable. Of course it won't detect an OS or any files to scan, but it will scan memory first. Check here for a "brief" complex tutorial: http://vx.netlux.org/lib/static/vdat/tumisc51.htm

What is a memory resident virus? Quite simply this is a virus which installs code in memory which infects future programs. In order to accomplish this, the virus must find a way to allocate memory for itself, in other words, it needs to find a place to hide. Furthermore, the virus needs to establish a procedure to activate the resident code to infect files.

That was just a though though after you mentioned the kazaa infection
WDDiag is the result we need and Noo's recommend of the zero fill should do the trick if the drive is alright.

[Vette]

Ok here's the update.

I tried hooking up the HDD to a newer computer..no errors. I tried using
DLG Diagnostic from WD using both the express test and the zero fill utlility all with no errors. Then I ran fdisk and fomatted only the first 504 Mb of the HDD and Windows installed perfectly . Apparantly the computer is reading the HDD correctly, but Windows is not . I am going to use EZ-Drive and see if I can get that to setup a suitable partition that this computer and Windows will agree on. I would really hate to setup about 23 - 504MB partitions on this computer, and I'm going to see if there is a BIOS update for this boat anchor. I should have done that in the first place since it is an older computer.

[GrandDad]

Ok here's the update.

I tried hooking up the HDD to a newer computer..no errors. I tried using
DLG Diagnostic from WD using both the express test and the zero fill utlility all with no errors. Then I ran fdisk and fomatted only the first 504 Mb of the HDD and Windows installed perfectly . Apparantly the computer is reading the HDD correctly, but Windows is not . I am going to use EZ-Drive and see if I can get that to setup a suitable partition that this computer and Windows will agree on. I would really hate to setup about 23 - 504MB partitions on this computer, and I'm going to see if there is a BIOS update for this boat anchor. I should have done that in the first place since it is an older computer.

You said :
Yes the BIOS reports the HDD correctly. I'll download WDDiag and run it in the morning. Is there an antivirus that will work on a computer that has no OS installed on it?

you sure BIOS see's it right ?
I've installed 98 on from 540mb to 20gig harddrives with no problems , (it should as you already said)

edit ;
did you do above in new PC or old one ?

did you use DLG to format and partition the drive ?

[NooNoo]

What version of fdisk and format are you using?

Did you say Y to the large hard drive question? (large being anything over 540mb....)