HDD question

ok gang, got a hdd question for you all

i built a pc for my aunt / c2d, 500gb, etcetc - worked for a year or better then they got internet happy, fubar'd the opsys [winxp] and called on me to fix her up

the opsys was toast so i figured hey ill just reinstall / i will remark while in winxp there were 2 partitions - a 150gb and 350gb [give or take a few mb]

so im in the winxp install and i notice the only thing showing was the primary partition [?]

hmm, odd ... so i stop there and pop the drive in my system and sure enough - shows up as a 150gb drive... and nothing else

tried to manage the device, nothing... as far as windows is concerned it was a 150gb drive and that was it...

nice... so i pop it back in the original machine... try a couple of mbr fixes and voila! i now have a 500gb drive

yay for me... but... i still cant get winxp to load? odd...

windows will walk through the install and then once it restarts the drive will not load, but route right back into the install

its like the initial boot instruction has been damaged in some way shape or form / but i, for the life of me, cant figure it out

when i tried to load win7, its the same story, shows it as a 500gb drive... copies all the files, expands etc....

then once it restarts, the system pauses and displays a few random characters!?

so... what random virus will corrupt a mbr and allow the drive to be a drive, relative to storage - but stops it from being a boot device

my tech level is rather high... so ive tried to fix this thing 100 different ways from sunday using a working good machine and multiple different configs

i havent tried to scan it for viruses yet, cause i dont own that type of software [ive never had one, smart enough to avoid them]

any ideas? thanks in advance mates

Best bet (since you've already nuked the data on it anyway) is to zero it out using UBCD or DBAN. That way you can be absolutely sure there's nothing on the drive causing you problems. That being said, a virus in the MBR would be taken out when you reinstalled XP or Win7. And there's no way for it to load without having it's boot code in the MBR. But that doesn't mean there isn't a problem popping up some other way.

Most likely, you have a dying drive or bad memory on your hands.

i didnt know if there was a way a virus could write to the boot sector that would survive formats and mbr fixes

drive is under warranty until 2011 so technically its win win / just wondering what [if anything] i should try....

thanks for those suggestions!

ryan_975 said:

Most likely, you have a dying drive or bad memory on your hands.

Click to expand...

i know - ive been building pc's for over 12 years now... ive never ran across a drive that works as a storage device, but not as a boot device

and ive tried this drive in 3 different systems [3 diff mobo, mem, processors] same silliness on all 3...

odd indeed

I know this may be a bit late late but for anyone else having this problem try this. Run diskpart from a command prompt, select the disk that is having the problem, and type in clean. If that doesn't work then do what jamhamm said. Don't need to zero write the whole disk, just the beginning.