Hey guys...
A while back (probably almost 2 years now) a friend of mine was given a laptop that someone didn't want anymore, which had a 40gb 5400rpm Travelstar in it. The laptop was working fine, but this 'friend' went and tried to reinstall Windows XP at one stage and really borked it... From what I can recall he ended up in the recovery console at one stage, ran some command, and fubar'd the drive. He mailed it to me shortly after since he couldn't repair what he'd done, though I never really did even try it out.
After doing some cleaning the other day I found it again and decided to hook it up and see how it went. Upon plugging it in (via a 2.5" USB caddy) it's detected and installed along with the caddy, and everything appears fine. However, the drive doesn't show up in My Computer (naturally) and attempting to fire up PartitionMagic with it plugged in spews out the error "Init error 100 : Partition table bad". With it unplugged, PM fires up fine. I also tried running PM's Ptedit.exe (think that's the correct name) to try and manually edit the partition table and enter the correct Cyl's, Bytes and so on..but as soon as PTedit loads, it says something like 'Boot table bad' (sorry not at home, hard to get the exact message, but that should be it). I can still see the drive in Ptedit, and the size is correct (37,868mb), but everything I try and do fails. If I select it in the list, I get the boot table error. If I try and enter in the cyls and so on, boot table error. If I end up entering them all and trying to apply it, I get a neverending stream of "X number must be above/below X amount" even when the numbers are totally correct.
So what do you guys think? There has to be SOME way of fixing this fricken thing...a 40gb 5400rpm laptop drive would be pretty damn nice to have (replace my old 20gb 4200rpm). The drive itself appears fine, it's in perfect condition and makes no erroneous noises or clicks.
I'm going to try (for the sake of it) installing it into a spare laptop at home and seeing if I can do anything from the Recovery Console (if it'll even let me get that far, what with always wanting to log into a partition or such). But can anyone think of anything else I could try?
Thanks!
A while back (probably almost 2 years now) a friend of mine was given a laptop that someone didn't want anymore, which had a 40gb 5400rpm Travelstar in it. The laptop was working fine, but this 'friend' went and tried to reinstall Windows XP at one stage and really borked it... From what I can recall he ended up in the recovery console at one stage, ran some command, and fubar'd the drive. He mailed it to me shortly after since he couldn't repair what he'd done, though I never really did even try it out.
After doing some cleaning the other day I found it again and decided to hook it up and see how it went. Upon plugging it in (via a 2.5" USB caddy) it's detected and installed along with the caddy, and everything appears fine. However, the drive doesn't show up in My Computer (naturally) and attempting to fire up PartitionMagic with it plugged in spews out the error "Init error 100 : Partition table bad". With it unplugged, PM fires up fine. I also tried running PM's Ptedit.exe (think that's the correct name) to try and manually edit the partition table and enter the correct Cyl's, Bytes and so on..but as soon as PTedit loads, it says something like 'Boot table bad' (sorry not at home, hard to get the exact message, but that should be it). I can still see the drive in Ptedit, and the size is correct (37,868mb), but everything I try and do fails. If I select it in the list, I get the boot table error. If I try and enter in the cyls and so on, boot table error. If I end up entering them all and trying to apply it, I get a neverending stream of "X number must be above/below X amount" even when the numbers are totally correct.
So what do you guys think? There has to be SOME way of fixing this fricken thing...a 40gb 5400rpm laptop drive would be pretty damn nice to have (replace my old 20gb 4200rpm). The drive itself appears fine, it's in perfect condition and makes no erroneous noises or clicks.
I'm going to try (for the sake of it) installing it into a spare laptop at home and seeing if I can do anything from the Recovery Console (if it'll even let me get that far, what with always wanting to log into a partition or such). But can anyone think of anything else I could try?
Thanks!
). Considering this drive is hooked up via a USB caddy, will this program still be able to access it? Or should I just do this once i've installed the drive into a laptop?
