Troubleshooting ATA Drives..

[Geoff Reed]

At 04:48 AM 3/12/2005, you wrote:
>I've used (or attempted to use) ATA ZIP 100 meg disks on my HP 1000
>As for the Compaq drive, I have a Compaq 20 gig drive from a DeskPro
>machine that has a partition that cannot be altered.
>
>If I write over the first tens of sectors (writing all zeros) that drive's 
>firmware
>will 'restore' the boot block and some number of later sectors.

do you mean 20 meg drive?  the old deskpros with their 20 meg early IDE 
drives were odd critters....