SATA - NTFS - second boot sector unwritable

D

dandirk

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 5, 2004
Messages
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Having a problem with a drive... I have a server with a mish-mash of drives (9) one of them being a WD SATA 250GB...

I physicially moved the machine and the SATA drive was unreadable and windows reported the drive as full (it only had 40gb of data on it). I recovered as much data as I could and tried to reformat the drive.

Formats through windows fail (generic unable to format error). I have the acronis disk suite and tried through that... seemed to work ok. Explorer will not report the size of the disk and I get a structure corruption error when I try and access. (I have deleted partions numerous times through windows and acronis, created new ones of difference sizes etc. all with same results)

I tried to perform a chkdsk on the drive and it returned the error "second boot sector unwritable"

Using acronis I deleted the partition and wiped the drive (write 0s), no change.

I AM able to format to FAT32 and the drive does seem to copy data to/from and function ok.

I ran the WD disk check tools from their site both short and extensive both came back ok.

I am as I type running the write 0's function of the same WD software but do not hope for much..

I am at a loss? How can I erase/fix the 2nd boot sector for a NTFS partition as it seems the drive is ok?

I have reseated all cables/controler cards and have reinstalled the controler drivers....
 
Well when I get home I think I am going to try and use Ghost to copy a functional NTFS partition and copy to the drive and see if that works...

Please let me know if I am on base here... I am just going to try everything I can think off.
 
Might sound silly, but a phone call to WD might help. Could be they have a utility to re-write the firmware, or a suggestion as to an exact fix.

Or, could be the drive is pooched, not a happy thought but possible.

I have found WD techs to be more then helpful

Luck
 
Got it!

For some reason or another the SATA controller was not funtioning properly... Doesn't really explain the FAT32 working though.

Once I put the drive on an onboard controller everything was good!
 
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