I have a hitatchi 7k3200259 SATA 250 GB drive which is installed in a Apricorn external drive enclosure. The enclosure was attached to a dell inspiron E1505.

I attempted to partition it using the EZGIG software which came with the enclosure. The goal was to partition the drive, clone the c:drive and swap the new disk for the installed hard disk. After more than an hour of processing, the screen went blank and I could not awaken the system. After powering down and rebooting, the new drive seems to have two partitions: the dell recovery paritition from the d partition on the original disk and the c drive, but neither of these is accessible. The EZGIG software refuses to do anything, so I tried to use the EASEUS partition mananger (and later Symantec Partition Magic 8.0) to partition the drive. Nothing has worked and I believe that a low-level format is necessary.

I tried downloading and installing the HDD LFF low level formatting tool. If the USB drive is not plugged in, it starts normally. If the USB drive IS plugged in, pops up a dialog box with "Error" as the title and a message with the text, "Error accessing device: the system cannot find the file specified.


Help?

More information. The USB disk is now attached to a Dell360 tower running XP PRO. The USB enclosure and the drive were attached when the system booted. HDD LLF 2.36 build 1181 now starts correctly, but the USB drive is not in the list of available disks