My Hd is gone after reformating though it is detected by BIOS

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That's pretty stupid what i've done but here it goes.

i just wanted to have some extra space to use for Windows and I had an entire HD 80GB Maxtor for testing Linux. But i did'nt use it that much and 80GB is a bit too much for a system i barely use. So i decided to have it back for windows. I fdisk /mbr the thing, LILO was gone, hard drive was detected and ready to be reformated. The first thing i did was just to quick format the hd. Then I splitted it in 3 logical drives, the last one was feromated fully as it should. Then i decided to reformat the first partition (50GB) and it cemmenced pretty well. It went smoothly up to 100% percent and then i got an error message "The reformating wasn't succesfull". Ok, no probs I'd try to reformat it once again but the whole disk this time. But the system started hanging a bit and then when i could get back to computer management panel my hd was gone. No sign of it whatsoever. Nothing. I rebooted, checked my BIOS, BIOS recognised the drive. Bun not my WinXP. I can' find it listed in Disk Management it's just gone. Nowhere else except for device manager where it is still listed and "works properly".

The error i got in event viewer was like "a bad sector found".
The hard drive is nearly new (4months) and was barely used.

How can I get it back? I need just reformat it properly but as i said it is not recognized by Windows.

Thanks for any replies
 
Probbly a bad MBR most harddrive disk utilities have a tool on them to make a MBR ..

If this does not solve the problem Zero out the drive itself (Write all Zeros to it) not same as a formatt.. this will solve your porblem since you do not have any data on it this would be your best route

check you harddrive maker website for a utility MAxtors is called maxiblast..

hope this helps you
 
Thanks a lot for the reply.
I wrote the post and then went to bed, but before that i coincidentelly read a couple of posts on the forum and found the link to the maxtor utility, just as u recommended.I Run their tool powermax (low level formatting) and when i woke up and rebooted, the disk was found. Right now Windows is busy formatting it once again. I hope this time no last minute problem occurs.

Thanks for the reply.
 
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