Hello,
I have 2 old HeadStart Explorer XT PC's.
Got them because it was my (read: my parents') first computer 20 years ago on which I learned the basic's of DOS, (gw-)Basic, etc. Got them both for free and in both PC's the harddrive is not working anymore.
I hear it spin-up, I see 1 primary partition in FDISK and I can remove it but when I try to create a new partition it is looping. Booting from exisiting partition, format.com, it doesn't work at all.
Will a low level format work? I've tried already with the DOS 3.31 debug.com but on all commands I tried I got a divide by 0 error message. Are there good (rll) disk repair and format tools which can be run from a 720k dd floppy?
If you can give me some hints on how to proceed getting this working.. would be great!
And if the drives would be really dead, can I get a good one (of alternative) somewhere for reasonable prices?
I have 2 old HeadStart Explorer XT PC's.
Got them because it was my (read: my parents') first computer 20 years ago on which I learned the basic's of DOS, (gw-)Basic, etc. Got them both for free and in both PC's the harddrive is not working anymore.
I hear it spin-up, I see 1 primary partition in FDISK and I can remove it but when I try to create a new partition it is looping. Booting from exisiting partition, format.com, it doesn't work at all.
Will a low level format work? I've tried already with the DOS 3.31 debug.com but on all commands I tried I got a divide by 0 error message. Are there good (rll) disk repair and format tools which can be run from a 720k dd floppy?
If you can give me some hints on how to proceed getting this working.. would be great!
And if the drives would be really dead, can I get a good one (of alternative) somewhere for reasonable prices?