How To Format or Fdisk MBR on NTFS Secondary Hard Drive

Hello All!

I've painted myself into a corner on this one:

After losing my CD-ROM drives in Win XP, I decided to roll back to WinME. I couldn't convert or format my 2nd hard drive prior to the roll back so that it would revert to FAT 32. My primary drive is FAT 32. Partition Magic kept saying it couldn't convert d/t bad MBR.

Now in Win ME I've tried Fdisk, and it won't switch active drives, probably because ME doesn't know how to handle NTFS file format.

Anybody have a suggestion as to how I might format the MBR on this secondary drive which is in NTFS file format?

Thanks, in advance,

Don
ddoorn@yahoo.com

 

format

What ver: pqmagic? I'm having great luck w/7. Place recovery disk 1 in drive A & boot thru disk 2, type pqmagic, follow menu

 

Ugh...PM7, New User, Many Headaches...no solutions yet...!

Have been there, done that re: the pm 7 recovery disks. I get an error message before it completely loads: Error #89 - EZ Drive detected but not running, hold CTRL key as you reboot and insert the rescue floppy. I do this, and it brings me around to the same error message.

I have uninstalled XP, reverting to WinME, which I had upgraded from, PM7 was hosed, so reinstalled it, but when I go into PM7 and right click on the NTFS hard drive to select "FORMAT" I get the following error message: Error #4 - Bad Argument/Parameter.
In the Information about this drive I see BADMBR listed, so I figure the Master Boot Record is corrupted.

I have even tried the WinME boot floppy & fdisk, however fdisk freezes when I try to switch the active hard drive to the NTFS drive so I can format the MBR (and everything else on it!).

I tried to uninstall PM7 to reinstall and see if this solves any problems, but I get an error message when I try to do this: Severe: Unable to load DLL. This sounds a little too serious to go in and simply delete the PM 7 directory.

I hope someone out there has some solutions short of formatting my OTHER hard drive....?

Don

ddoorn@yahoo.com

 

I noticed you mentioned EZ Drive earlier in this thread, you may wish to read this, for a possible solution. HTH

 

ezdrive

Hi Don, you have a "bios overlay" for large hard drives. This site sorta helps ya
http://www.storagesoft.com/products/drive_utils/ez_drive.asp

If your drive is a Maxtor here is the error code site http://www.maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm, but download
MaxBlast Plus II and your probs can solved with their utes.

The http://www.powerquest.com/support/primus/id817.html site is the master error codes. Rancher

 

Thanks for tips/resources

I'll be checking out these sites & see what I can do. I have already tried the MaxBlast floppy, but it wouldn't work, don't remember the error message I got.

Again, thanks! These links look like they'll save me a fair amount of time & effort scouring about.

Don