"Disk Unusable" during Reformatting C

[marisa]

Trying to reformat the hard drive on our old computer so that we can give it to a friend. Keep getting "Invaild media or Track 0 bad - disk unusable".

What does this mean? Any suggestions??

Thanks.

[renegade600]

it could mean the the drive is dead. Was it working before you started messing with it? Also go into bios and see what it says about the harddrive.

[marisa]

It is an older and slow machine, and it was working okay prior to trying to reformat. Sometimes it would get hung up opening programs and such.

Should I be looking into replacing the hard drive? How does something like this happen?

[renegade600]

It is an older and slow machine, and it was working okay prior to trying to reformat. Sometimes it would get hung up opening programs and such.

Should I be looking into replacing the hard drive? How does something like this happen?
Check bios and see what it says about your drive. Also you can try booting with a floppy and see if you can enter the drive that way.

As far as how it happened, not sure if anything happened yet. But it could have been a bad reformat, the drive could have already been on its way out. However hopefully neither is the problem. Just gotta keep probing until we find out what is going on.

[Alfons]

If track 0 is really bad, then yes you want to replace the drive. That area is needed at startup and can't be mapped out if you want to use the drive to boot from.

You can go to the disk manufacturer's support site and see if they have HD utilities and diagnostics boot disk maker programs that you can download - if yes, download them and run them to make the bootdisks, then run a comprehensive diagnostic on the HD - if it passes you're OK, and if not you can try another utility that will write zeros to each location on the drive, then re-run the comprehensive diagnostic and if it fails again get another or junk to whole PC (it may not be worth the price of a new HD)

If you do get a new HD, you'll need to get one that the PC can recognize - an old PC, for example, probably won't recognize a new technology (ATA100 or 133) HD and you'd need to add an IDE Host Controller Adapter as well as the HD.

[Miz]

Since the term "reformat" can (and often does) mean different things to different people, at what point are you getting the error message? When trying to run the "format c:" command or when trying to reinstall Windows?