Unusual Hard drive problem..is this a virus???

[webstruck]

I have a conner technology 10gb HD that I was using without any problems. I added a 20gb maxtor and used Drive Image to clone the disk and operating system from the 10GB onto the 20Gb. all went well and the pc runs fine with the cloned 20GB as the master drive.

however, after formating the 10Gb drive and installing it as a slave... windows reads it as a 512mb "Removable" drive?? the bios reads it as a "oochemoogoe" instead of a connor drive and autodetects the wrong cyl head settings.

I have made countless attempts at re-formatting, f-disk, and manually inserting the correct cyl head settings so that is reads as a 10Gb drive only for it to revert to an "oochemoogoe 512mb" removable drive when I boot into windows. I downloaded the seagate (connor compatible) disk diagnostic tool and ran it on this drive. It came up as ok but as an 8 gb drive with only 15 cyl instead of 16 !!!

I am completely baffled with this problem..it is a new one to me. And as Connor tech went bust and are in the process of starting up again under new management and seagate do not give tech support to the CT range of drives I am hoping one of you guys can throw some light on this one.

Is it a boot sector virus that Norton cannot see?
or is the hard drive buggered?
Your views would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

 

[dinosnake]

Let us try one thing first - switch the drive to the secondary channel and set it up as Master. I have seen drives from different manufacturers play games with each other when on the same channel. Their interpretation of ATA standards does not exactly and perfectly match.

Also please double-reconfirm the jumper setting on the drive for correctness.

You can check or erase the boot sector (I can provide Norton DiskEdit and the instructions how), but it is probably not the problem. The BIOS reads the CHS info from the Diagnostic Cylinder. You may be able to find a program that is compatible with your drive to rewrite the cylinder - WARNING : it must be the correct program. But try it only as **a last resort**. Your mileage may vary...