Rick, fdisk is a good suggestion, but a less likely cause you should still
consider is that the drive is from an old bios pc.  It may have a drive
manufacturer's program like Western Digital's EZ-BIOS installed on it.  It
may have been fdisked without LBA support enabled in CMOS, or you may not
have enabled LBA in your cmos.  Any of these can cause seeks to physical
disk sectors that don't exist, with the result the drive hangs and scandisk
freezes.  Make sure your cmos recognizes the full drive size, then using
fdisk remove all partitions and add a primary dos partition and set it
active.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Thornton [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:21 PM


Hi,
I am trying to rebuild an old Pentium 166 with 32 meg ram.  i FOUND A 640
mEG hdd Which I was told works. It is recognized on boot up.  When I try to
load an OS it goes to scandisk and stops there with no activity.  When I try
to format it it says it can't read the drive.  Is the drive stuffed or am I
doing something wrong?

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