BleepingComputer.com: Hard Drive Error

This is all going on on my Eee PC 900HA, running XP SP3 and Windows 7 beta (not RC)

In the process of trying to reformat the Windows 7 drive (D) on my Eee PC to install the RC, I found out that it could not be formatted. The format stopped when the drive was only wiped, saying "The disk cannot be formatted." Now, my D partition is wiped clean, I can't format it, it's inaccessible, and I have no way of installing an OS on drive D.

Using Disk Manager by way of control panel exposes further problems... I open it up and it cannot recognize any drives (not even my main C drive). The only one it can recognize is the virtual cd-rom drive setup by Daemon Tools. Therefore, I can't manage anything with it and it is useless.

I tried running a Live CD of Ubuntu off of an SD card, so that I could maybe format the drive within Linux, but it didn't write correctly. I reformatted it using the Eee PC and lo and behold, the other PC I used for downloading the Live CD no longer recognizes the SD card. When I try to write the image to the SD card from the Eee PC, I get a handle error "An error occurred when trying to get a handle on the device."

Can anybody help out?

This post has been edited by valdesjon: 07 June 2009 - 05:58 PM

Hi valdesion,

Can you use your XP cd to get to the recovery console? If so, look at help for diskpart. There's a way for the cd to scan the disk for partitions. The other possibility would be to run a recovery program which undoes the format.

Also, see this: http://www.computerhope.com/unformat.htm
It describes how to unformat formatted disks - if that's not odd English ... I think what it means is to un-reformat ...

I don't know if that will help.

Zllio