[Techtalk] Bad Superblocks

[Alvin Goats]

Try checking the drive with some other utilities: 

What does your bios think the drive is? 
What format of the IDE drive does the bios think it is?
What does it say when you tell the bios to automatically find the HD?

Go to Seagate (www.seagate.com), buried somewhere in their system are
some DOS utilities that will probe the daylights out of the drive and
find what it is and how it is configured (LBA, normal, etc). I think the
file you want is find-ata.exe. 

While you are there, get their other utility that will low level format
EIDE drives (what you AREN'T supposed to be able to do). This will give
you a last chance effort to save a dieing HD and use it for something
else (I've had limited success with it, but it did save me from buying a
new drive EVERY time ;) ).

Once you know what these think your drive is, set the bios accordingly
and it *should* work. If not, then try each of the settings the bios
comes up with.

I've had similar problems and this seems to be where the problems
originate. Number of sectors, heads and tracks not withstanding, if the
bios doesn't know how the drive is set up, Normal, LBA et al, then
nothing really works right. 

Good Luck!

Alvin