i was playing around with an old ide drive that i wanted to use but it kept booting into the hp recovery partition instead of my new os installation.
i 'unallocated' the recovery partition and i tried making the os partition active but then i got a message that said it had a virus and stopped.
i found a drive hex editor and zeroed out about the first 25 bytes on the disk thinking that another program could install a new mbr or something like that.

problem now is that if the drive is connected, the bios sees the drive but the computer will not boot into anything and locks up with a flashing cursor right after the bios screen.
so i can't boot into an operating system so as to try to fix the hd.

am i sol on this drive or is there still a way to play with it.
can i boot into a cd and then connect the hd without causing the computer to reboot? 9haven't tried this)

i forgot to mention that the drive is a maxtor diamondmax from about 2003.
i don't have it here to be specific.
it is a 160mb drive that worked well until i tried to install a new os and then zeroed out the beginning bytes.

thanks.

You can try to look at this using MHDD from here. Download it and run it and then you can zerofill your entire drive. See if this one can help you out on this.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Do you need any data on the drive? If not I would just erase it, repartition it and install the OS again.

Look at some of the available utilities like r-studio etc if you want to try and repair it.

thanks for the input.
there are photo files on the hard drive that i would like to save and i would like to use it in another computer if possible.

some updates.
i tried the drive in another computer with the same motherboard - different bios and it also locked up the computer.
then i tried it on another motherboard and the computer did boot to the os of the other hard drive in the box.
i was able to play a little with the maxtor drive in storage management and expanded the partition but could not get rid of two other partitions on the drive.

next i returned it to the original box and it no longer locked up the computer.
i played a little with some of the utilities on the hiren disk but it still wouldn't boot from the partition that has the os.
i will play with mhdd tomorrow and see if i can make the os partition active and solve my issues.

the weird thing for me is that while i was installing an os, it rebooted once or twice into the correct partitioin but when the installation was complete the boot failed.

i feel like i am getting closer.........

If you keep going on like this one you will screw it up and lose all on this drive. I would stop now before it is way too late and clone it to another drive. On the cloned drive if you make a mistake you lose nothing. You can reclone the drive again and start over. But on this drive if you screw up and make an error then game over. Clone your drive and go again.

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Iorana Haraharaini

yeah, i am coming to that conclusion also.
i did find a way to make the partition active but it still would not boot to that os giving an error instead.
so i have a new hd and am trying to install the os but running into new problems - memory perhaps.
but that's a continuing story for another day as i work this out.

thanks for the help.

so i installed win 7 one more time on the problem drive and this time it installed fine and rebooted up ok.
so the drive is Back.

i think the key was getting it into a motherboard that didn't lock up when booting with the drive connected.
after that, things fell into place.