Hello. A lot of small problems happens to me lately and i feel very frustrated right now. I hope that i will get some help from you guys.
 Small introduction:
Just 1 week ago, i bought a 40GB Seagate HD. It doesn't have any warranty, it's not new, but it's in mint conditon and looks unused. I spent 2 days to partition it and copy all of my data from my other 2 smaller HD and everything was going well. I was using my new HD for about a week perfectly, until yesterday...: (end of introduction)

 After a reset, (one of the many) i saw that the HD was no longer able to boot... So, i connected my old HD as master and the new one as slave to see what's going on.
 After i booted, i saw that there were no partitions from the new HD. :-( Only a ghosted (non-accessible) device icon by the name.... DF4:Z\\30\30 WTH!!! (I have no disk-drives connected to my Amiga, btw)

 I lanched HDInstTools to see what's going on and i saw that all my partitions has been vanished indeed! And that's not the end of it:
Vendor's name: [\;<889<
Name : Y(8(8(8(8(8(8(8(  (Omg!..)
HD Size: 234,775 MBytes

 So, i said: "Ok, everything from my new HD is lost, ok. Let's restore the correct parameters and start all over again"
 And that's what i did. I restored Vendor, name, corrected the HD size by adjusting "cylinders", "block per tracks" etc. And then created new partitions.
 Lastly i saved the new settings by pressing "Save changes to drive" and reboot.

 After it rebooted (from the old HD, new HD is still slave) i saw that NONE OF MY SETTINGS WERE STORED!!... :-(
 The DF4:Z\\30\30 icon is still there and so is the weird vendor's name, HD name and HD size from HDInstTools...
 Likewise, the new partitions are also not stored. HDInstTools shows no partitions. :-(


 Epilogue:
 I have been using hard drives in my Amiga for more than 10 years! There were some rare incidents in the past, were every HD parameters became corrupted, but i was ALWAYS able to restore and save my setting to the HD.
 Well, not in this case. I have repeated the proccess 5 times and absolutely _NOTHING_ can be stored to the HD. With HDInstTools and HDToolBox. This is the first time that i comfront something like this.
  I'm using the build-in IDE port and i have the IDEFix software installed.

   Please help.

Either the device driver or the filesystem wasn't >4GB aware. It took about a week to get the disk filled enough to reach the 4GB mark, and at that point the beginning of the drive got corrupted.

 The result is that you lost the RDB (partitioning info) and probably the first partition was overwritten.

 Even if this is the the case, why it inhibits me from save ANY settings now??.. Any setting, not just adding partitions...
 In any case, i doubt it, as i was using the scsi.device of IDEFix and both PFS SFS.

To reinitialize the HDD you probably need to "initialize" it (just as if you'd be adding a new, blank HDD).

 But, i can't! See above reply and first post.

Or alternatively the HDD just died.

 This seems to me the most reasonable explanation so far, but just in a single week?? :-(
 I have been using old and noisy 8GB HD's for many years and none of these died in my hands!

 You can low-format the drive on a peecee using a specific tool from the drive's manufacturer.

 Download the tool, boot on to DOS (no windows in the background) and use the tool to low-level format it.

 I had a Samsung SP0411N (also 40Gb) with that kind of problem. After running the tool the drive is now an Amithlon drive, working like a charm.