Error reading fixed disk

[IcedEarth]

Hello,

I got myself a new harddrive that I've divided in two
partitions. I used fdisk with an old 98se bootdisk. First
I activated and formatted the first partition and then I
installed XP on it. Everything ran fine. Then I looked for
a way to activate the second partition from within XP but
didn't immideately find one so I inserted the 98se
bootdisk again, ran fdsik, activated the partition and
formatted it. Then when I relaunched XP it froze with the
message that a new hard drive may have caused a problem.
So I booted up again with the disk, ran fdisk and got a
message "error reading fixed disk".

Running XP in safe mode won't help and adding the drive as
a slave in another XP system has the same result: winXP
won't boot.

Adding the drive as a slave in a win98se system however
does work and I can even run fdisk from within win98. I
can format all partitions and I can remove them. But then
when I try to install XP on it again, it says that it
can't access the disk.

And finally, Partition Magic 6 refused to boot on the
win98 system when this particular hard drive is connected
to the system.

Does anybody have any ideas on how I can 'clean' this
drive and start from scratch???

Thanks in advance.

[Sasq]

Try the makers site, usually they have some sort of utility for checking the drive from dos. Also usually there is some sort of option for re-initializing the disk

Dan

[Wombat]

If by "activate" you mean "set partition as active," then that's your problem. The active partition is the one that the machine will try to boot off of. For Windows (at least 9x) you MUST have the C drive Active.

[IcedEarth]

Thanks Wombat but that wasn't the problem. The disk was screwed up by using a mix of XP and 98 disk system utilities.

Sasq, thanks! I downloaded a Maxtor utility from their site and did a low-level format. Everything works just fine again.