fdisk problem

[Nomad84]

I just put my new computer together this afternoon. So far, I've only installed the Raptor and not my storage drive. I am trying to partition it so that I can install Windows, but I'm having a problem. I am using the FDISK tutorial from fdisk.radified.com. I created the primary partition without any trouble, but I'm having problems creating an extended partition. Each time I try to create an extended partition, it freezes when "Verifying drive integrity". It hits a max of 16% before stalling out temporarily and returning to 0%. It will eventually just stay at 0% and I have to ctrl-alt-del to get out of fdisk. If I just create the primary partition and reboot, it shows up fine, but if I try to create an extended partition, after I reboot, no partitions show up. Where should I be looking for help?

I am using:

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard
WD Raptor 74gig hard drive
WinME boot disk

[_dave_]

Surf over to www.masterbooter.com (http://www.masterbooter.com/download/sharewareversion_en.html) , download the software.

Contained within the download is efdisk.exe, an inmproved fdisk.

Try this, it can create >1 primary partition.

good luck.

dave.

[Meech]

[ QUOTE ]
WinME boot disk

[/ QUOTE ]

Tell me you aren't gonna actually install that POS on your box??

Why not just boot the XP disk, create the primary partition through there, install XP -- then create your additional partitions through XP?

[Nomad84]

I do plan to install ME on a small FAT32 partition so that I can use DOS apps if necessary, but I will be using XP 99.9% of the time. I only used the ME boot disk because it was recommended by several websites as the best boot disk for using fdisk. I eventually gave up on fdisk and tried to format from XP setup, but I had problems there too. I eventually got fed up with it and swapped the raptor for my maxtor storage drive. I formatted it as one large partition and installed xp successfully. I installed SP2 and it would no longer get into windows. I got fed up with that, and I'm messing with the raptor again. I can't even get WD's diagnostics tools to run for this drive. Every time I try to format it, it says "Trying to recover allocation unit ####", where #### is some number that slowly increments, accompanied by lots of clicking from the hard drive. Eventually it will say "Not ready Format Terminated." The Datalifeguard Diagnostics software from western digital has given me different errors each time, including IRQ Timeout, Unknown Error, Command Error, IDNF Error, and now No Drive Found. See errors 0112, 0101, 0132, 0116, and 0120 here (http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/general/errorcodes.asp).

This is getting frustrating. I'm still not even sure if it's a problem with the drive or a problem with me. Right now, it isn't even showing up in the BIOS. It is, however, clicking a lot. The clicking is at about 2Hz. It clicks 40 times, pauses, and repeats. This is annoying /images/graemlins/frown.gif

[Nomad84]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm still not even sure if it's a problem with the drive or a problem with me.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just got off of the phone with WD tech support. After telling them the problems with the bios not correctly recognizing the drive, the error codes from their diagnostics program, and the successful use of a different sata hard drive, they said it was a dead drive and I need to return it. On the plus side, their tech support was not a pain to deal with like many other places I've had to deal with. Almost no phone wait time either.