Unwritable boot sector

I have installed a Maxtor 60 gig HDD in my Micron desktop, and set it up with two partitions of equal size, as my BIOS was limited to 32 Gig partitions. I installed the new drive as the primary master, and the old one as the primary slave. I installed Win XP on the C: partition, formatting it to the NTFS file system. I noticed at that time that Windows was showing the D: partition as a FAT 32 partition... I wanted both the C: and D: partitions to be NTFS for several reasons, so I ran the convert utitility in order to change to the NTFS file system. Windows showed the D: partition as 28 Gig used and 2 Gig free space. So I ran the chkdsk /f command and solved that problem.. Now another problem came up: The system hung a time or two when I tried to something with the D: partition, so I decided to do a format and start over from scratch using the format /fs:ntfs command. This process failed midway through, saying that the boot sector number two was unwritable. I also tried doing a format with Partition magic, same results. All of this while the C: partition is functioning just as it should; the system boots up and runs all the programs installed on the C partition. Now I have a 60 gig hdd that is only half usable, and the D partition is shown as 'unformatted'. I don't know where to go from here... any help will be appreciated.

Flyboy

The BIOS is not usually aware of partitions. If you have a 32Gb limitation
with the BIOS, it is probably withr espect to the disk as a whole. Therefore
the BIOS would have no problem with a partition that is entirely within the
first 32Gb, but would not be able to access a second partition that was
beyond that point.

Do you have the exact details of the BIOS problem?
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (DTS)
"Lee Byler" wrote in message
...
I have installed a Maxtor 60 gig HDD in my Micron desktop, and set it up
with two partitions of equal size, as my BIOS was limited to 32 Gig
partitions. I installed the new drive as the primary master, and the old one
as the primary slave. I installed Win XP on the C: partition, formatting it
to the NTFS file system. I noticed at that time that Windows was showing the
D: partition as a FAT 32 partition... I wanted both the C: and D: partitions
to be NTFS for several reasons, so I ran the convert utitility in order to
change to the NTFS file system. Windows showed the D: partition as 28 Gig
used and 2 Gig free space. So I ran the chkdsk /f command and solved that
problem.. Now another problem came up: The system hung a time or two when I
tried to something with the D: partition, so I decided to do a format and
start over from scratch using the format /fs:ntfs command. This process
failed midway through, saying that the boot sector number two was
unwritable. I also tried doing a format with Partition magic, same results.
All of this while the C: partition is functioning just as it should; the
system boots up and runs all the programs installed on the C partition. Now
I have a 60 gig hdd that is only half usable, and the D partition is shown
as 'unformatted'. I don't know where to go from here... any help will be
appreciated.

Flyboy

What does the /fs switch do?
"Lee Byler" wrote in message
...
I have installed a Maxtor 60 gig HDD in my Micron desktop, and set it up
with two partitions of equal size, as my BIOS was limited to 32 Gig
partitions. I installed the new drive as the primary master, and the old one
as the primary slave. I installed Win XP on the C: partition, formatting it
to the NTFS file system. I noticed at that time that Windows was showing the
D: partition as a FAT 32 partition... I wanted both the C: and D: partitions
to be NTFS for several reasons, so I ran the convert utitility in order to
change to the NTFS file system. Windows showed the D: partition as 28 Gig
used and 2 Gig free space. So I ran the chkdsk /f command and solved that
problem.. Now another problem came up: The system hung a time or two when I
tried to something with the D: partition, so I decided to do a format and
start over from scratch using the format /fs:ntfs command. This process
failed midway through, saying that the boot sector number two was
unwritable. I also tried doing a format with Partition magic, same results.
All of this while the C: partition is functioning just as it should; the
system boots up and runs all the programs installed on the C partition. Now
I have a 60 gig hdd that is only half usable, and the D partition is shown
as 'unformatted'. I don't know where to go from here... any help will be
appreciated.

Flyboy