[alexmat01]

Hello All,
I have an IBM TP 600 and was trying to reinstall a used 20 GB Travelstart HDD from Toshiba.My old one of 6 GB had failed.
However I face issues while formatting.
1) It tries to format but at the last step aborts mentioning cannot write to the boot.
2) I used boot CD and I can see that the harddisk is partitioned and there are two exes on the same. One is a Toshiba driver and another exe that I googled but couldnt make out what it was. I tried deleting from the DOS prompt but it wouldnt.
3) Tried most of the MBR tools and other HDD low level erase tools but they all aborted at some point of execution
4) Did a surface scan and it was successful so there is not physical damage to the drive.
5) fdisk /mbr failed too

I am wondering if this was any boot sector virus or something else that is causing this issue. Is there any MBR wiping tools that someone can recommend. Or is this HDD fit to be thrown out ?

Thanks
Alex

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Try the Dban program (in my signature). It wipes the entire drive by writing 1 and 0's.

[123Runner]

Try the Dban program (in my signature). It wipes the entire drive by writing 1 and 0's.

[alexmat01]

I tried the DBAN

The PRNG and Glutemann and Quick Erase.
All of them erroed giving a NON FATAL Error. Since I dont have a floppy drive I couldnt get a log written.

Btw I ran the Drive Fitness Test (DFT) by Toshiba and the SMART test showed the drive was fit.

Its recognized on the laptop when I check the BIOS and when I ran a test from there, it came ok.

But if simply wont let me wipe the boot sector or format it

[SRX660]

A last ditch method is to use the free killdisk utility to fill the drive with zero's.
Read up on it here.

http://killdisk.com/features.htm

SRX660