Hardware Problem. FAT32 to NTFS

[Chitty]

Hello everyone! I have a weird problem here...

I have a PC with WinXP giving me all kinds of problems (the most significant one being that the PC suddenly shuts down) so I formatted my HD and then I tried to install Ubuntu (7.10 I belive)... while at that I noticed that the installation went extremelly slow... (I had successfully installed Ubuntu with the exact same CD in the same PC before and it was way faster)

The installation crashed (I'm sorry I don't remember the error message I got then). I went ahead and restarted my PC only to find out that it's useless now :S Ubuntu doesn't start and I tried to format my PC using the WinXP CD and I was unable to do so, because on the partition screen my HD appears in an unrecognized format and hence I can't do anything... I also tried to install Ubuntu again and no luck...

Besides the hardware problem I may have, how can I change the FAT32 format to something that can be recognized so I could format my HD again and start all over...

Thanks beforhand for your help.

[oz]

how can I change the FAT32 format to something that can be recognized so I could format my HD again and start all over...

The easiest and best tool for working with your partitions (in my opinion) is the Parted Magic LiveCD.

Download the ISO image file (it's small), burn it to a blank disk as an image, and then boot your machine from the CD to setup your partitions and format them however you want.

[Chitty]

Downloading... thanks

[Jonathan183]

You should be able to use gparted from the live cd to erase partitions. You could also use dd to erase the hard drive partition table. If you need further help with this boot from the live cd and post the output of

sudo fdisk -l

... the l is a small L

[Chitty]

The easiest and best tool for working with your partitions (in my opinion) is the Parted Magic LiveCD.

Download the ISO image file (it's small), burn it to a blank disk as an image, and then boot your machine from the CD to setup your partitions and format them however you want.

I tried this approach and when I booted my machine from this CD I got the following:

pnpacpi: exceeded the max number of IO resourses: 40
ata 1.00: BMDMA	stat 0x25
ata 1.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
ata 1.00: status } DRDY ERR }
ata 1.00: error: { UNC }
ata 1.00: configured for UDMA/133
ata1: EH complete

Everything in the code repeats in a loop except the first line... and after a while ( 2 minutes or so ) the Parted MagicLive CD starts. I go ahead and open GParted and it says 'no devices detected'. And here is where I ran out of ideas...

I also tried to use GParted form my Ubuntu Live CD and had the same outcome. ( when using this live CD I also got error messages similar to the ones above in the CODE )

I opened the terminal and typed what Jonathan183 suggested (sudo fdisk -l) and there was no output.

At this point I don't know what to do... please help thanks

[i92guboj]

By the look of that, there's some hardware problem (and that would explain also the sudden shutdowns, and the slowness the few times that the disk worked.

You can try playing around with the disk a bit: plug/unplug cables, revise jumpers, check power connectors, move everything around a bit, change the data cable and see what happens. If possible, check the drive in another box.

If it continues failing, then you are the owner of a dying HD.

[Jonathan183]

You might want to give something like the UBCD a try and see if you have a hardware problem ... if so track down exactly what is causing the problem.