Here we go again... :rolleyes:

Installing a 250 gig WD2500JB harddrive into my, now AOpen board that already has functioning multiboot 80 gig drive. The new one is on an internal RAID controller and the card's BIOS is setup.

Partitioned the drive, not sure, but I think I did it with the xp cd. I made 4 semi equally sized partitions of 60 gigs (last one 58). Went to format them in xp and found only one choice. NTFS. So I booted to a Win98SE boot floppy and formatted all the partitions but on the last one, where you get to name the 'volume' the pc 'hung'. So I saluted the 3 finger thing, CTRL/ALT/DEL.

Went into xp, then 98 and both saw the drive as 58 gigs but only 46 available space because it reports 12 or so as being used up already. Yeah right! :rolleyes: So I ScanDisked with xp and enabled 'fix errors'. It fixed 'some' but I didn't gain much ground. Went into Win98 and tried to Scandisk, got blue screened!

Put in DataLifeguard and booted to that. No errors on that drive whether it be the quick or the extended test (yes the 250 gig). Rebooted to xp, same prob. Rebooted again to a Win98 floppy and ran ScanDisk on that part., formatted, now I am only lacking approximately 2 gigs.

But from within Windows, if I try to format or ScanDisk, I either get a blue screen error or a report of bad sectors, 98 vs xp respectively. At one point, I ran D:LG again and it still comes out clean.

Now, if I was only dealing with the 2 gigs that are now unavailable, I could live with it. But I don't dare to put any work onto that volume for fear of corruption of some sort. This pc is for video editing so I need my 'space'! ;)

I could not find a way to use DataLifeGuard to write zeros to just that partition. I may be able to start again but sheesh, I'm into it for quite a bit of time already! Anyone got any ideas? :confused:

You could use a partition manager to simply delete that partition and then recreate/format it anew. Partition Magic, BootIt-NG and Ranish should all do that without blinking as long as there is no underlying physical defect. You could also use PTedit and fill in just zero values for that partition table - which is just a manual way of doing what those other utilities all do in order to "delete a partition" but which takes a fraction more care on your part.

If you really want to zero just that partition afterwards then the easiest way would be to use something like Eraser (http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/). That would zero the data area but to zero the system areas you are going to need a hex editor that can work outside the file structure. Tiny Hexer (http://www.mirkes.de/en/freeware/tinyhex.php) should be able to do this for you - but there is a learning curve.

PS Always think of the straightforward thing last of all - but can you not just delete that partition using WinXP's disk management - and then recreate it.