All,
Apologies in advance for the long message -- I wanted to provide all the detail that I could. The basic problem is that I'm unable to format my C: drive after erasing it. Here's the background:
I have a Dell XPS 2 with two 250GB hard drives. (Other specs are listed below.) I got it in 2003, I think. I want to sell it, so in preparation, I tried to clean and format the hard drives. I used Darik's Boot and Nuke to do the job. The cleaning went fine until the end, when I got a message saying the process was complete but there had been some non-fatal errors because of some bad sectors.
I couldn't boot up the computer afterward, of course, because I forgot to make a boot up disk. I tried using the Windows XP installation CD, but all I got when restarting the computer was a "press F1 to retry, F2 to setup" message. I can enter the BIOS, and I put the CD-player at the top of the boot disk, but no good.
My concern is that my "secondary master drive", according to the BIOS, is listed as "Samsung CD-R/RW SW-252S ! ! !", and the exclamation points make me think that the CD drive isn't working and hence cannot be used to boot. (Before I erased Windows, the OS was not recognizing the drive for some reason.) My "secondary slave drive" works, though.
Anyway, I got a boot disk and can now get to the A: prompt. I used FDISK to create 1 FAT32 primary DOS partition on each hard drive. After restarting, I then tried FORMAT, but after hitting "Y", I got this message: "Fatal error writing setting disk access flags...format terminated. Error Code: 05". I did a google search and found that other people have encountered that message, but unfortunately I didn't understand any of the details...
Also, after partitioning the hard drives, I now get this message when trying to boot from the CD (or just from the hard drive): "partition signature != 55AA".
So, I'm at a loss. Because I don't have convenient access to a floppy drive, and because I'm not sure my CD drive is working correctly, I'm hoping someone might be able to suggest a solution that involves use of a USB flash drive. A google search showed me that such things were possible, but the solutions were a little beyond my tech skills.
The only other piece of info I can offer is that attempting to DIR the C: drive gives me an "invalid media" message.
Sorry again for the long message.
Here are my computer specs.
Dell Dimension XPS Gen 2
Two Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz processors
Two 512Mb memory sticks
Raid 0 Volume 465.6Gb hard drive (2 drives)
RADEON 9800 XT 256Mb video card
RADEON 9800 XT - Secondary 256Mb video card
USB Audio Device
Creative Audigy Audio Processor (WDM)
Microsoft Windows XP Pro
BIOS: Dell Computer Corporation, version A06, 09-27-04
Standard floppy disk drives
Intel(R) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D2
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D4
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D7
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24DE
Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller
Thanks very much in advance for any help.
Mike
Apologies in advance for the long message -- I wanted to provide all the detail that I could. The basic problem is that I'm unable to format my C: drive after erasing it. Here's the background:
I have a Dell XPS 2 with two 250GB hard drives. (Other specs are listed below.) I got it in 2003, I think. I want to sell it, so in preparation, I tried to clean and format the hard drives. I used Darik's Boot and Nuke to do the job. The cleaning went fine until the end, when I got a message saying the process was complete but there had been some non-fatal errors because of some bad sectors.
I couldn't boot up the computer afterward, of course, because I forgot to make a boot up disk. I tried using the Windows XP installation CD, but all I got when restarting the computer was a "press F1 to retry, F2 to setup" message. I can enter the BIOS, and I put the CD-player at the top of the boot disk, but no good.
My concern is that my "secondary master drive", according to the BIOS, is listed as "Samsung CD-R/RW SW-252S ! ! !", and the exclamation points make me think that the CD drive isn't working and hence cannot be used to boot. (Before I erased Windows, the OS was not recognizing the drive for some reason.) My "secondary slave drive" works, though.
Anyway, I got a boot disk and can now get to the A: prompt. I used FDISK to create 1 FAT32 primary DOS partition on each hard drive. After restarting, I then tried FORMAT, but after hitting "Y", I got this message: "Fatal error writing setting disk access flags...format terminated. Error Code: 05". I did a google search and found that other people have encountered that message, but unfortunately I didn't understand any of the details...
Also, after partitioning the hard drives, I now get this message when trying to boot from the CD (or just from the hard drive): "partition signature != 55AA".
So, I'm at a loss. Because I don't have convenient access to a floppy drive, and because I'm not sure my CD drive is working correctly, I'm hoping someone might be able to suggest a solution that involves use of a USB flash drive. A google search showed me that such things were possible, but the solutions were a little beyond my tech skills.
The only other piece of info I can offer is that attempting to DIR the C: drive gives me an "invalid media" message.
Sorry again for the long message.
Here are my computer specs.
Dell Dimension XPS Gen 2
Two Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz processors
Two 512Mb memory sticks
Raid 0 Volume 465.6Gb hard drive (2 drives)
RADEON 9800 XT 256Mb video card
RADEON 9800 XT - Secondary 256Mb video card
USB Audio Device
Creative Audigy Audio Processor (WDM)
Microsoft Windows XP Pro
BIOS: Dell Computer Corporation, version A06, 09-27-04
Standard floppy disk drives
Intel(R) 82801EB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D2
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D4
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24D7
Intel(R) 82801EB USB Universal Host Controller - 24DE
Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller
Thanks very much in advance for any help.
Mike