Long story short my friends hard drive is screwed up. So I tried to delete the partition and reformat and I can not delete the partition. The label has some characters in it that dos won't let me type.

So I brought the hard drive over to my house and hooked it up as the slave HD. I can get my PC up and running but when I try to do anything with the screwed up HD everything locks up.

How can I reformat this hard drive so my friend can start over?

If I try to access the D:(the problem HD) the PC locks up and trying to reformat from the C: by typing format D:\ it just sits at 0%.

Thanks.

Comments rather than solutions:

1. If the hard drive is that bad your wasting your time. Drives are pretty cheap now so why not lash out for a new one?

2. Go to the HD manufacturers site they often have excellent diagnostics and formatting tools there.

3. Download a floppy image of a deletion tool like "Boot'n'Nuke", make sure the faulty drive is the only one in the system, boot off the floppy and in a couple of hours the hard drive is wiped.

4. Is the faulty drive recognised in your system BIOS? If not you wont be able to go any further. Re-check your jumper settings or put the faulty drive alone on the CDROM cable and see if it works there.

hth

Depending on what the problem is with the hdd, I've recovered hdd's in the past by doing a zero format/wipe of the drive. This process has fixed whatever was wrong with the drive, if the drive is physically damaged or has faulty components then the only solution is to bin it and buy a new one.

If you have a high speed internet connection I'd suggest downloading UltimateBootCD which has all the diagnostic and wiping tools you'll need.

I appreciate the suggestions but I really don't know what any of that means.

I am hoping for some sort of erase button but the format option doesn't work.

I also don't have a 3.5 drive.

Thanks.

If you say which suggestion or comment you are interested in I'm sure the originator will not mind giving up their time to explain in more detail.

The faulty drive is in your system but the system locks up when you try to access it. IMHO either the drive is so faulty you're wasting your time trying to reformat it OR you have not connected it correctly to your system. Until you have it correctly connected to your system you will not be able to do anything to it, and you run the risk of corrupting your own hard drive.

I am interested in whatever will get the drive working again. If that means formating it and reloading my stuff then that is what I will do if that means finding out that the hard drive is broke needs to be trashed that is what I will do.

I would like the least complicated solution as possible since as I said above the things mentioned are foreign to me and my experience in this is very limited.

The ultimate boot cd is very easy to use as long as you read the onscreen menu's, all you need to do is look at the program menu options and select what you want to do.

Screenshots

Have a look at the above screen shots. To wipe the drive:
Press F2
Then I think it's the space bar to get to the next screen on hdd tools. Keep going until screen 5 comes up, then use Active Kill Disk F3, then I think it's 0, then wipe the drive with zeros.

If this doesn't work the hdd is dead buy a new one. You will be able to confirm this buy doing the above but stopping on screen 2 of the hdd tools and running seatools desktop this will see if the drive is functioning correctly.

Remember the download is a ISO file this means you need to select burn image if your cd opens with filename.iso showing as a file then you've done it wrong.

If you want a small program to burn ISO images get SmallCDWriter here it's only about a 200kb download.

SmallCDWriter
Disc
Record ISO image to disc.

Or if you want a fully featured CD burning solution download CDBurnerXP Pro which can also burn ISO images.

The hard drive is trashed, get a new one.