External Hard Drive

Hi
Hope someone can offer some advice. I use an WD external HDD to back
up my laptop the only files I keep on it are the image file for my C:
drive and the incremental back ups I take every evening. Now you are
starting to think how wise I am well you better read on.

My laptop has started to act up and it refused to boot up from cold
getting just to the Windows Welcome Screen it gives one of the
following errors then powers down.

Insufficient system resources exist to complete API

No virtual memory or paging quota is available

Application failed to initialize properly

When I am at my desk I disconnect the battery after making sure it has
a full charge and run from the mains. I found out that the laptop will
boot up if I connect the battery, disconnect the mains and re-connect
the mains after the computer has successfully started. However in a
lot of tasks the computer is very slow.

I decided that I had better make a fresh image of the hard drive just
in case. half way through the computer decided to power down, of
course I not only lost that image but using Norton when generating an
image it overwrites all files on the HDD thereby deleting all my
previous back ups.

Now I have a external HDD connected by USB that was not recognised by
Windows in My Computer although it appears in the Devices Manager. I
discovered some software on the Internet called Partition Find and
Mount which scanned the external drive and put it back onto My
Computer screen. However, when I try to access the drive it reports E:
is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

Does anyone know of any software that will allow me to format the
drive so that I can use it again, if I try to format from DOS I get
the error drive write protected.

I am a silver haired surfer, not technical but will soon be a bald
headed surfer as I need this drive to back things up to in case a new
laptop is required.

Yes I am in a bit of a mess any help would be greatly appreciated and
any questions answered to the best of my ability.

Thanks

Dave

<telsave.TakeThisOut@googlemail.com> wrote in message
news:6740a507-993b-40b3-81d7-91e1ce66b23f@62g2000hsn.googlegroups.com...
> Hi
> Hope someone can offer some advice. I use an WD external HDD to back
> up my laptop the only files I keep on it are the image file for my C:
> drive and the incremental back ups I take every evening. Now you are
> starting to think how wise I am well you better read on.
>
> My laptop has started to act up and it refused to boot up from cold
> getting just to the Windows Welcome Screen it gives one of the
> following errors then powers down.
>
> Insufficient system resources exist to complete API
>
> No virtual memory or paging quota is available
>
> Application failed to initialize properly
>
> When I am at my desk I disconnect the battery after making sure it has
> a full charge and run from the mains. I found out that the laptop will
> boot up if I connect the battery, disconnect the mains and re-connect
> the mains after the computer has successfully started. However in a
> lot of tasks the computer is very slow.
>
> I decided that I had better make a fresh image of the hard drive just
> in case. half way through the computer decided to power down, of
> course I not only lost that image but using Norton when generating an
> image it overwrites all files on the HDD thereby deleting all my
> previous back ups.
>
> Now I have a external HDD connected by USB that was not recognised by
> Windows in My Computer although it appears in the Devices Manager. I
> discovered some software on the Internet called Partition Find and
> Mount which scanned the external drive and put it back onto My
> Computer screen. However, when I try to access the drive it reports E:
> is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.
>
> Does anyone know of any software that will allow me to format the
> drive so that I can use it again, if I try to format from DOS I get
> the error drive write protected.
>
> I am a silver haired surfer, not technical but will soon be a bald
> headed surfer as I need this drive to back things up to in case a new
> laptop is required.
>
> Yes I am in a bit of a mess any help would be greatly appreciated and
> any questions answered to the best of my ability.
>
> Thanks
>
> Dave


Dave:
Insofar as your problem relates to formatting your USB external HDD so as to
have a "clean" HDD with no data on it - when you used your DOS floppy disk,
did you begin by using the FDISK command and through that command attempt to
delete the partition(s) on the HDD prior to the FORMAT process?
Anna