I got this great idea to build my own PC. I am reasonably technical, for a girl. I purchased a Soyo 6vba-133 motherboard, with a Pent III (500) Processor. I had difficulty with a hard drive, (40 gig) with a limitation in the bios, I got the new bios. After fdisk, the formatting of the drive was "terminated". I try again, same thing. So I use ezbios to install the drive. That works (for a while). I put a second drive in, again, same problem. Then mysteriously I get the message "Could not find partion table". This has happened with three different New hard drives. One of the drives was replaced by Western Digital (they will be getting the other two!!), and I was told that the first 0 contains the boot record and it was damaged? As I read, it could be virus, but I have ruled that out, as the drive had nothing on it, no internet use, no apparent way to get infected. I have a feeling that there is something wrong with the motherboard that is causing these hard drives to loose their boot record, but I don't know where to go and "learn"...I'm hoping one of you techies, can help send me in the right direction!! I'm running out of hard drives!! ;P

OK, the hard drives, being new, wouldn't be likely to have any virus problems, but how about the boot floppy you're using to do the fdisk or ezdrive installation with? If the computer they were made on has a boot sector virus on it, that will be transferred to any floppy accessed on that computer. Therefore, soon as you boot to that floppy in the new machine, you're transferring the virus to the boot sector of the new drive.

Check into getting a start up disk made on a known clean computer, and if you downloaded the EZ Drive program, do it again, on a known clean computer.. And make SURE you write protect them before use.

The problem you're having sounds very much like a boot sector virus that overwrites the boot sector so that no matter what you do, you seem to have no master boot record available, so it sees no partition table.



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