Scrambled Hard Drive

[t-rex]

Hello,
i bought a used machine off ebay, great deal ibm think centre 2.8ghz $142u.s no O\S
i know this is a laptop catagory. i'm cheating but this is a general question and the desk top forum looked pretty slow.
anyway i get the machine 40gb hd, 256ram, dvd player all i need to do is swap out the afore mentioned parts with the hp desktop. 160gb hd, 1gb ram, two dvd writers.
sounds easy enough except i forget one thing too copy the documents folder to my external HD. when i remembered this i was too the set up on what partition of loading xp pro. i hit f3 and bailed.
then hooked up to the hp to retrive the wife's pics. would not boot.
a little history the hp would not see any more than 131gb even after running seagates utility. it would boot to the seagate screen and no futher .
so i decided to f disc it. in f disc it only saw a 32 gb partition, that's about the amount of free space i had, roughly or is it the diff bewteen the 131 or 127gb as older p-4s limit you, with the partition creatated with the seagate utility?
next i tried putting the drive in the external enclosure on cable celect, no luck. then i made a bootable floppy for drive scrubber from system mechanic, but still did not work.
the drive was before i sickened it. i know there has to be a utility to wipe this mess clean.
so no matter what it's nothing but ibm here three machines in the house t23 t22 tc8188. after being inside the thinkcentre wow what a POS that hp is.
thank's in advance to all replys, to you and yours

MERRY CHRISTMAS
T-REX

[GomJabbar]

I think this post from another forum explains it best. This applies to IBM computers circa 2003, but should work in most any situation I believe.

Format HDD with IBM Hidden Partition

[t-rex]

thank's for the info.