Dell complaints

anonymous guest · Regular Hater Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 44

Could the BIOS not be set to auto on sensing the hard drive and be looking for a specific drive that is an 80 GB? I have had to reset the Dell BIOS on occasion when replacing hardware with non direct replacement.

SBryant · Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 11:37 am Post subject:

All I did with the 2 drives (which were formatted to NTFS) was put them into the laptop and start up the laptop and check the BIOS which said 78GB, so I took the drive out right away and connected it to another PC and booted a gparted live cd which reported one partition of 78GB.

Tried reformatting to no avail. Will try some more investigations tonight.

StrangeFarer · Hates with a Vengance Joined: 16 Nov 2005 Posts: 50

Ahhhh...there's the missing info....

"...tried reformatting..."

There are layers of hard drive access, my friend. At the lowest layer, a drive is platters. These need to be managed, so the drive controller sections them off and indexes them.

Well, these indexes are very general, and non-specific. To make a filesystem live there, they have to be further processed into partitions.

Even at that level, the partitions can be formatted with multiple types of filesystems. This is the level you're at- many strata removed from the layer we were worried was the issue.

If this is correct, the NON-DOS DEBUG script we advised you to use should blast all that away, leaving a drive that has to have those lower layers put back on, cleanly.

Trust me- you do that, assuming the drive isn't actually smoked at the physical level, and you should get all your space back.

FallenAngel · Super Hater Joined: 21 Feb 2006 Posts: 1483

SBryant · Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 5:34 pm Post subject:

I'm going to have to be really dumb now and ask where to get debug from. Tried booting from a Win XP CD and going into recovery console and it's not there, and tried a bootable CD of MS-DOS 6.22 that I found on bootdisk.com but I'm running out of ideas.

Thanks so much for all this help.

SBryant · Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 6:42 pm Post subject:

Ok, ignore the above post. I ran the debug script which wiped the drive clean but it's still showing as 78GB. The drive can live on as a spare second drive, 78GB is better than none.

Thanks for all your help, all this time spent because I tried to help a friend out. If he sticks with Dell he's on his own. Rolling Eyes

Rocke_T_Sinetist · Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 6:59 pm Post subject:

Still stumped as to how that could happen, technically, to the point it could not be reversed.

It just confirms what I've always said, 'anything can happen'. It's even possible to get a good system from Dell. Well, it WAS, anyway, in a time long ago and a galaxy far away.
_________________
Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

FallenAngel · Super Hater Joined: 21 Feb 2006 Posts: 1483

You could try a low level format utility from the drive manufacturer (if there's one available). This rewrites the whole drive like it would be done back at the factory. DEBUG and standard formatting is high level/high pass, so the low level is much more robust.

Low level formats are seldom used, but you could try. Or suggest it to your friend if you don't want to invest any more time into fixing it yourself.