Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[fokkegerrit]

Hello I have a brand new Seagate ST1000DM003 barracuda  but when I do low level format whit killdisk and restart whit killdiks or seatools I get the message illegal partition table - drive 00 sector 0 three times (see picture) is this normal ?

When I use superfdisk to remove MBR than the message is gone and when I do a low level format again than you see the message again

regards

[fzabkar]

I don't understand why you are low-level formatting a new drive. If you want to erase it, you could zero-fill it with SeaTools. Otherwise just zero the MBR and use Windows or Linux, or your preferred OS, to partition and format it.

[fokkegerrit]

I have two of the same Seagate one is new and has the same message and I didn't low level are zero fill it you see it only when Seatools and killdisk startup in dos

I had windows 7 on the one of the HDD but the partition did odd. But is it normal that you low level are zero fill the driver that you get the message illegal partition table - drive 00 sector 0

[fzabkar]

The error message appears to be coming from FreeDOS.

AIUI, both SeaTools and KillDisk are launched from a bootable CD. When the CD boots, it launches a utility called BCDW (Bootable CD Wizard).

Bootable CD Wizard v1.50Z - Freeware Multiple-Image Bootable CD Manager:
http://bootcd.narod.ru/bcdw_e.htm

The CD contains an image file (*.IMA, *.IMG) which is an image of a virtual storage device, eg hard drive or floppy disk. This image is loaded into RAM and then "booted" by BCDW.

The virtual storage device contains a bootable FreeDOS operating system plus the application software (ie SeaTools or KillDisk). When FreeDOS boots, it examines the system for other storage devices and attempts to mount their file systems. It then assigns each file system a drive letter. Your application software is automatically launched from the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files.

In your case, KillDisk has filled sector 0 with the data pattern that it uses for secure wiping. Sector 0 is where the MBR code and partition table reside. When FreeDOS examines those bytes which would normally contain a valid partition table, it finds KillDisk's unintelligible data instead. Therefore, the error is benign. In fact I would view it as a warning rather than an error. When you used SuperFdisk to remove the MBR, it would have replaced KillDisk's data pattern with zeros.

In short, don't worry about the "error". Just go ahead and install your OS.