How do I format a HD when 1st boot sector is unwriteable?

[sundoulos_]

I was using drive manager in Vista to delete two partitions and reformat to a simple drive on a spare 60GB HDD. All was fine until I accidentally unplugged the power to the external case containing said drive :blackeye: in the middle of format.

When I hooked drive (USB ext case) back up and tried to explore to it - Explorer stopped responding until I killed power. Same with Drive Manager. I then went and ran cmd. Here is what I did (in bold):

...>format k:
The type of the file system is RAW.
The new file system is NTFS.

WARNING, ALL .... WILL BE LOST!
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? y
Formatting 58625M
Volume label ..... ENTER for none>?
Creating file system structures.
The first NTFS boot sector is unwriteable.
Format failed.

C:\Windows\system32>chkdsk k:
The type of file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

BTW the format process went through the % complete and took about 45 minutes.

How can I check the sectors and block off bad ones (if that would work)? But regardless, how can I fix the disk?

 

[mscrx]

try to boot the computer with a windows xp cd (note sure if vista supports the same stuff) and go to the repair console. there you try 'fixmbr' the drive.
else you can try to boot the computer with 'gparted live cd', delete the drive and set it up again. I don't think you can fix this problem from within windows...

cheers, mscrx