Alright here goes. Seagate 500GB SATA2 internal hdd in question. I recently went from Vista64 to XP32. Vista worked Extremely well and the only reason i changed was the fact that i lost my wireless card and needed to connect to internet with my old wireless card that vista doesn't support till i got the replacement. So i deleted the Vista install keeping 200GBs of data. I installed XP, after 1st boot I recieved "Failure to load operating system". So i tried again deleting everything except my SAVE folder and recieved same message. Then i installed a 300GB PATA drive and installed XP on it without fail. I ran every drive diagnostic software i could find, and it returned that the drive is fine. So i transfered all data to back-up drive and used partition magic to re-format the drive in question. Tried XP again without luck, same error message. I used a norton ghost image to install XP and it was no issue, worked fine but slow. Still can install an OS. So i now have it is as a storage drive and now it clicks for a few seconds now and again but seems to be fine except the transfer rate is horribly slow and reems to revert to PIO mode instead of DMA. Ran a few online disk tests and the size of the drive reports double on pcpitstop.com but reports fine in XP. Called Seagate and could not get a RMA because it passed the SEATools tests. Now my question is this. If there a utility that i can run that totally wipes the drive clean, including MBR, Boot Sector, etc. etc. And the second question, Does anyone have and tips on what to try next. Any and all sugestions are welcome. Thank You. Any questions just email me ... sdbingaman@yahoo.com. Peace
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