Somthing strange going wrong in hard drives

Blufx · 28th September 2004

I folks,I haven't been around for a while but that doesn't mean I haven't had problems. This is going to take a bit to explain and I think I'm just understanding what's happing heer. But I don't have a clue what to do about it.
My wifes computer(AMD 750 mhz on a presario motherboard now although it was an MSI 6156 with a celeron 433) has had an onging problem for a year and a half now(with both motherboards). It's constantly having problems that are weired most of the time and imposible at others.I know at first she was hit with a trogan or two and maybe some other bugs,but she has learned to keep all that cleaned out now with help from Adaware,spybot,spyware blaster.regseeker,and ZoneAlarm Pro.We use defragmenter every week and scan all files for viruses often with the latest from mcafee.And of course all Windows updates.
But it still has problems that I can't understand or try to explain to her. She had learned to reformat and reinstall windows ME like a pro except every time there will be things wrong,mispelled,out of place,or just missing. Strange problems.Including one she told me of I just couldn't believe.On the disk we just formated(single partition),she installed WinME. after installing,she opened Outlook Express and it popped up a box with her screen name she hasn't used in a long time and was waiting for a password.Where did it get that info from? I didn't have a clue. Fdisk just shows a single 19.08 gig partition and nothing else.Same with Windows explorer. She told me she heard about some hidden drives or partitions that windows or dos can't find. Well, I kinda passed that off,like,how would they get there?I didn't do it. I finally got tired of hearing about it and being ask questions constanly so I bought her a WD 20 gig drive 7400 rpm to replace the old Seagate 20 gig.It was used a little so I wanted to make sure it didn't contain any data left on it so I installed it in my machine as a slave then ran Active@killdisk on it. When Killdisk opened,it showed my floppy info and my Maxtor HHD on this machine.
Just below that it showed the WD with just over 19.gigs.I wiped the disk clean,then created the new partition using fdisk,and formatted it.I put the drive back in her machine. She reinstalled windows and a few of her back up progs and soon started complaining of the same problems again. Why she liked WinME so much I'll never know, but I already had XP ready to put on it,and told her to do it this time.During setup she chose clean install and to format the drive in NTFS.She installed all the virus and spyware stuff and ZA. Plus some of her pics and "not much else" she said.I thought everything was going to be fine now WRONG!
Xp too started acting up! Weired things again and it still remembered names that should have been gone! OK,I'm gonna do it myself now! I put in the Killdisk floppy,booted up,and when killdisk started,it showed not a 19.point something gig drive but something like a 18.03 I think.
Just under that it showed another drive of 7.63 gig.
We never made a seperate partition on this drive and the numbers don't add up right either. You can't see it in the bios post,Dos,fdisk,or Windows.Killdisk is supposed to work under windows from a floppy and destory all data by overwriting it with zeros including MBR.You are supposed to have nothing left on this drive when finished.So I started with the big one and it took around an hour to finish. Then the little one of 7.63 gigs took TWICE the time to overwrite as the 18.03. Strange. I restarted the machine again with killdisk in the floppy. It's still showing two seprate drives.
This is nuts. Now I put her old drive back in and guess what I found? Two drives with almost the same sizes as on the other.
I can't imagain what piece of software or junk shes got that could have done that.I told her to get rid of all the software she's collected.(I don't know where she got most of it,but almost all of it's from the web...you know ,those real cute sites with all the pretty pics, junk downloads, and other assorted malware.)anything she really needs can be replaced easy.
I'm courios as to what may be in that space and what it's doing but What I really need to know is how to get rid of these hidden partitions. All we know they are there but we can't touch them or access them.
Someone told me I can erase a hard drive using a good demagnetizer. I just happen to have one in the toolroom at work It's good and powerful for use on tools and other handheld stuff.I just don't know if there is any danger of damaging any other parts of the drive.
Anybody out there ever heard of this before? It must be coming from some piece of saved software she has. I have three computers sharing a cable connection. I have checked this machine and the old HP with the same Killdisk program and on each,only the floppy and one primary harddisk partition was detected.

OK,I think i said it all. Thanks in advance, Mark

**markp62** · 28th September 2004

Delpart

Blufx · 28th September 2004

Thanks,I'll take a look at that. I'm still wanting to some more answers to this problem. If anyone else has anything to add,please post. I'll be back after work today.

Thanks,Mark

Blufx · 2nd October 2004

OK,I'm still at a lose on this one. I installed her 20 gig hdd with WinME as a slave on my computer. Killdisk showed My hdd,plus two more below. one is just over 18 gig,and the other is 7.36 gig.I ran killdisk on both of them and rebooted.This time it only show the 20 gig as as a little over 19 gig but it didn't have the extra drive below it anymore. I put it back in her computer,put in the killldisk floppy just to check again and the it showed two seperate hdds again.Is there anybody out there with an answer to this? It's driving my wife nuts which ain't doing me any good either.

**markp62** · 3rd October 2004

I don't have any answer to this. But, I am moving this over to Hardware to see if someone has an idea on this.

90durham · 4th October 2004

Hi: Not familiar with killdisk but have you tried formatting and installing the Wd drive using the MFG tools? Might be worth a shot. The package from WD has diagnostics with it as well.
Link
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp