Conner drive not partitioning? \ VOGONS

Conner drive not partitioning?

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First post, by cj_reha

Posted on 2017-04-02, 01:32

cj_reha Offline

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I bought a 1.2 GB Conner CFS1275A IDE hard drive off of eBay a little while ago, and it is detected in the BIOS of the PC it is currently in, but will not format. Logically this means it's unpartitioned, so I start fdisk, it says there's no partition, confirming my suspicion. I go to create a primary DOS partition, and it stays at "Verifying drive integrity, 0% complete" for a couple minutes, but then I get the error "No space to create a DOS partition."

Is the hard drive DOA? Or am I missing something?

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Reply 1 of 4, by Jo22

Posted on 2017-04-02, 02:01

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Hi, perhaps something is wrong with track 0. Spurious data then could confuse FDISK..
It's just a guess, though. Tools like Acronis Drive Cleanser or GParted could maybe help here.

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Reply 2 of 4, by jesolo

Posted on 2017-04-02, 09:18

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Agree with Jo22's recommendations.
Which FDISK version are you using (i.e., the one with MS-DOS or the one with Windows 95b or higher)? Did you choose "Y" to enable large drive support? Not that you require it, but the previous partition could have been formatted with FAT32.

I've had some bad luck in the past with Conner drives. Most of the ones I had tend to fail.

Reply 3 of 4, by cj_reha

Posted on 2017-04-02, 14:45

cj_reha Offline

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jesolo wrote:
Agree with Jo22's recommendations.
Which FDISK version are you using (i.e., the one with MS-DOS or the one with Windows 95b or higher)? Did you choose "Y" to enable large drive support? Not that you require it, but the previous partition could have been formatted with FAT32.

I've had some bad luck in the past with Conner drives. Most of the ones I had tend to fail.

That's weird, I have two conner hard drives in my 486 box and both have zero bad sectors and are in perfect health. They sure are weird drives.

I am using the windows 98se install disc's version of fdisk. I tried to check it using my 98se box but it didn't even show up on my computer which points back to it seemingly not being partitioned. Large disk support was turned on.

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Reply 4 of 4, by SW-SSG

Posted on 2017-04-03, 05:39

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cj_reha wrote:
That's weird, I have two conner hard drives in my 486 box and both have zero bad sectors and are in perfect health. They sure are weird drives.

Mind you, Conners from around the ~1GB period were apparently beginning to have quality problems.

Either way, I would third the recommendation to use a non-Windows tool like GParted to see if you can get it going.

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