A drive fitness test. Does it pass?
Bob
In Device Manager, the hard drive shows up (WDC WD2000JB-00DUA0). If I go to its properties, and try to populate the volumes, it says disk unknown, type unknown, status unreadable, partition style not applicable, the rest 0 MB.
Going into Disk Management, I only see my (current) main drive, with its sole partition, C. The drive I'm trying to fix doesn't show up, not even as having an unrecognized partition. It just isn't there.
I tried reading it with a WinXp and Windows 2000 installation. The recovery console said the same thing for both of them, except giving different sizes (windows 2000 would have needed the controller card to see it as larger than 136GB)
190780 MB Disk 0 at Id 1 on bus 0 on atapi
(Setup cannot access this disk)
This is the same information that I can see from the BIOS. The HD is detected just fine at startup.
Furthermore, while loading the windows 2000 cd, it gave me an error Disk I\O Error = 00000420
Unfortunately, I can't be sure of the number of 0's, nor if there was a 'Status' somewhere in there. All I know, I get an error, and that's the number.
Booting from a linux live CD (beatrIX), it can see the hard drive, as well, but again, unable to read it (unlike other, healthy, drive).
I have placed other hard drives in its place, so I know it's not a cabling issue (need to cover my bases, here).
Does this look like something that can be resolved in software (and by resolved, I mean formatting to be able to use it is an acceptable solution), or is it a safe bet it's hardware?
Thanks

Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic