How to format my old T40 30gb travelstar hard drive

[shredfitz]

I just installed a new hard drive on my T40. The former drive is a Travelstar 30gb drive that came with the Thinkpad. It had an ext3 filesystem and had Ubuntu installed on it. I believe that it also has the hidden partition which contains the image for restoring.

I want to format the drive and use it in an external hard drive enclosure, but when I try to do this, I get error messages such as 'no partition table'.

Does anyone have any advice on how to go about this?

Thanks

[rkawakami]

If you can't get Windows to recognize, format or partition the drive, then I would resort to using a dedicated disk utility. I don't have any experience with an ext3 filesystem and the following process will wipe out everything on the drive (hidden partition included), but what I would try is this:

- get Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT) program from here (choose the diskette or CD download file)
- create the bootable media then shut down Windows
- put the 30GB drive in your T40 (main HD bay or Ultrabay via an adapter)
- boot the program, pick ATA support only, and let it detect your hardware
- highlight the 30GB drive; if you have the drive installed in the T40's HD bay, then it should appear as Primary Master. If you have it installed inside an Ultrabay HD adapter, then it's Secondary Master. Be doubly-sure that you have selected the correct drive!
- click Utilities/Erase Disk; Erase Boot Sector option might work but erasing the entire disk will definitely nuke everything

You should then be able to format the drive however you want. While you're at it, and long as you have DFT running, you might want to execute a Quick Test on the drive and make sure it's performing normally.

[Temetka]

Here this should work also:

1. Right click on my computer and select 'Manage'
2. Select 'Disk Management'
3. Select the HD you are NOT booting off of.
4. Right click on that drive and select 'Create Partition'
5. Format and enjoy.

Other method:

Boot off a Windows 98 floppy disk or cd/rom (select boot with cd, but not install 98, savvy?).

type 'fdisk'

select 'yes' for ntfs / non DOS partitions

select 'Remove non DOS partition'

confirm

select create a new partition

enable the whole drive

reboot

go into DOS again and type: Format c: /u

then boot into XP and use the prior method to re-partition and select NTFS.

Then you should be good.