From: Justin Fisher <jaf60_at_it.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 16:27:50 -0800

My 2.5 - 3.5" HDD adaptor arrived, and I connected my wasted 6gig drive
to my computer to see if I could fix it. I couldn't.

(I had forced the archos to try to load a 1000+ song playlist on flat
batteries with no DC in power. Once it starts reading a playlist, it
can't abort. It ran out of power and stuffed the disk. I promptly
upgraded to 30gig, but getting the 6gig working again would be nice).

The bios finds the drive without problem, but on boot up I get the error
"Secondary Master HDD failure". Not good.
Under windows98/dos/win2k, there is no drive letter assigned to the
drive, thus I can't use any utilities (scandisk, fdisk, etc). It
apparently does not exist as far as the system is concerned.
Under Win2k, if I check the hardware device manager, the Fujitsu shows
up - it says the devioce is working normally (ha!), but there does not
seem to be any way to interact with the drive or point anything to it.

How does low-level formatting work? I'm guessing that this would do the
trick, but unless the software looks directly at the hardware, the same
problem applies - if it takes its cues from the OS, the drive won't
exist.

Thoughts? Pointers? Help?

It's a bit of a disapointment that the Archos can effectively destroy
all information on the disk so easily. Backing up regularly is going to
be absolutely mandatory.
Received on 2002-01-12