Seagate 120GB PATA problem! I'm totally stumped!

Hey Guys,

I've had this drive for a couple years now, but every time i installed win (i install windows on another drive (80gb WD - primary master)), it would reboot the machine on install the first time and delete the partition on the seagate, the comtinue installing windows as if nothing had happened.

This was strange, but i thought it might just be the mobo and win combo doing summing funny, so unplugging the drive on win install was the way forward from there.

Now i need to use the 80gb for another machine and tried using the seagate alone in the machine as windows drive...all goes fine until windows setup reboots the maching after copying all the files across and the damn partition is deleted again!

I plugged the seagate into the other machine and tried it...this time the partition isnt gone, BUT after restard in the win setup, it hangs on trying to boot from the drive!!

ANY ideas whatsoever? As a slave or secondary master with win running on another drive this thing works perfectly, but try to boot from it and nothing works.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated..but please no crap like 'trash the drive and buy another', cause i really dont have the cash to buy another drive.

Thanks

I hate doing this, but you've got me stumped aswell, the first thing I'm thinking of is BIOS configuration and a failing harddrive controller, or a faulty harddrive controller, I'm really stumped.

You haven't got one of those dynamic drive overlay disc managers like Ontrack on there, accidentally left over from way back? The drive might just have bad boot sectors in any event.

I think what you may need is a partition protection app, preferably one with password protection which should prevent the OS from overwriting the partition without having authorised access to do so.

Try one of these and see if it works: http://www.exefind.com/partition-protection/

thanks for all the help guys...

sorry for this being in this category, was supposed to have put it in the 'software and hardware' section :s

thanks terraside. weird thing is...i dont think its the mobo now as i tried it in another pc and this time it doesnt delete the partition, but rather just fails to boot off the drive (hangs at the point where the windows loading screen would appear) although the windows installer copies all the files to the drive fine.

thanks pip, gonna try get an app to see if the boot sector of the drive is screwy (can something like that be fixed?)

thanks Highflyer_GP, will look into that aswell, altho this other machine not deleting the partition makes me lean towards the boot sector problem as pip mentioned.

thanks again for all the help, really appreciated it!

I have the exactly same problem as yours,my drives are also 80 and 120.Cheers,hehe.

I have tried partition in disk management and pqmagic,but didn't help.

what I do is using Ghost to backup my windows,when the windows is crashed,I use the backup to restore it.But if I reinstall windows,it delete all my partitions on 120G definitely.Luckily I can get all the partitions back by using a program called Diskgen,to rebuild partition tables.

I have no idea why it does this,and don't think something wrong with the hard drives or mobo.

i dunno if this is going to help

but when u install windows is it sp1 windows or sp2 windows?

it is windows sp2

same here, sp2 and also media center... BUT ghost also does this! I have run a number of tests on the drive and it seems that some of the boot sectors may be damaged... ****!

wonder if ghost damaged these??? hmmmmm... gonna try find the receipt and see if this thing is still under warranty!

i also tried to use some proggies to repair these sectors but they all just hang when trying to do that


btw. if you have not tried "Hiren's BootCD 8.3" to fix any issues you may be having, i advise you dload it! it really is insane!
get it here: http://maxt.dk/archives/2006/08/01/hirens-bootcd-83/