Partition problem... AARRGGHH!!!

[bigbondfan]

I have a western digital sata 200gb hard drive. it's been working perfect for the first couple of months, but it suddenly seems to be dying... I've googled the problem... but no luck

i have 2 hard drives... both have xp on. if i try to load either xp with my sata hd plugged in, windows asks me whether i want to boot in safe mode, after that, the computer just reboots after displaying a blue screen for a split second (something to do with ntfs.sys). Safe mode gets to mup.sys, then reboots. if i unplug my sata hd, xp boots just fine... so the sata hd is the problem

i've gone into suse linux and found the reason for the problems is a partition (sda3) on the sata hard disk. well, that's ok, since it's a useless partition anyway... so i'll just delete that partition... BUT... suse installer or YaST will not allow me to format that partition! I cannot load the windows installer cd because the computer will just reboot... so my sata hard drive seems to be royally screwed...

So i need a way i can delete/format/repair the problem partition... it is a 1.8gb partition (FAT16 - had win95 on), but i'm not bothered about the resulting partition type (fat, ntfs, reisereifs etc...).

Can anyone suggest a solution to my problem? I would need some sort of partitioning tool that starts on boot up (from cd or something)... preferably free.

Thanks

 

[Kage]

Can you by any chance boot the SATA hard disc when the computers booting with the Windows XP disc? And then format and delete partitions from there?

 

[bigbondfan]

thanks for the responce!

no, i've tried that - the computer says it's scanning the hdds, then just reboots. i can access the hdd in suse linux... all my docs are there... but the broken partition is unccessible and suse won't let me format it. hmm...

 

[Kage]

Hmm weird...

Tried a bootdisc to read it by any chance? Floppy drive will be needed of course...i think

 

[bigbondfan]

well i tried the windows 98 boot disk... but the only disks available are the a: (floppy drive) and b: (ramdrive)... no hdd drives

 

[~mr mixx~]

when you pressed the f8 button to get to the menu screen that had the safe mode option, have you tried high lighting the option (last boot configure that worked) ?

 

[bigbondfan]

yes i've tried that too... no luck. it's a problem with hardware, not software, so is suspected this wouldn't work anyway.

worse luck is that i can't just take my hdd down to out local computer shop... they went bust last month

any other suggestions?

 

[Bloodstalker999]

there are many linux live cd out there with Partition Tools on them I dont know of any that I can recommend but I think that would be your best bet.

 

[Jamxx]

Have you tried something like KillDisk? I've used it many times without fail with completely deleting partitions. Be careful though, and don't erase any data you might need.

http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

I hope you have a CD burner or floppy drive though...

 

[bigbondfan]

i'll check that out

thanks