I realise this hard drive is probable dead but would like to know how this happened. Samsung 30gig. First lost all partitions somehow. Owner says anti virus all up to date. Attached drive as secondary drive on another system. Detected in Bios but not seen in Windows explorer. In device manager, drive was there but not given a drive letter. Put drive as master and booted to Dos, did not read drive properly I think it was 1024mg, not 30gig. Fdisk just said non dos partition, Win98 was on this drive not XP so should have been Fat 32. Did not want to try and delete non dos partition as owner had important data on drive. Tried partition magic and ghost but non would recognise the hard drive parametres. So thought data is gone but might be able to save hard drive. Installed Drive rescue on a Master drive, this read the bad slave drive with no problems,unfortunately could not access any data with drive rescue but it restored the drive with Fat 32, so I then booted to dos again with drive as master, Fdisked and partitioned, took awhile for this to partition but okay. Then restarted and tried to format. Starts off at 0 and just sits there. Tried different boot up formatting discs but same thing. The owner will probably ask how this happened and as this is the first drive that I have not been able to access data, would like to know your opion. Can a boot virus realy do this much damage or is the drive just bad ?? thank you