spawning partitions

*i posted this in general security too*
maybe it isnt a virus so i posted here as well, im new here, seems like a good source!~~

I work at a computer shop. I fix a lot of viruses through normal means.

I had a hard drive in that showed up in bios normal but w/ a drive letter and no size or access in windows. (xp bench system, drive removed from problem computer) the data mattered so i wanted to format the drive and do normal ntfs recovery.

Here is the part I have never seen before, in disk manager i could see a couple partitions, the total size of all partitions equaled more than the total capacity of the drive. So something is screwy. Anyway, when i delete partition on the drive trying to get to a non partitioned/ non- allocated drive, it created 4 more partitions that i also coudnt delete.

MBR virus? any guesses or anyone seen this before?
I called the hd bad, recovered most of the data even though the drive was being strange. Just curious if anyone has seen this before.
partition magic couldnt format or delete the partitions either.
thanks in advance, not crucial, they have their itunes and outlook fully restored, just groaned at the bill a little

 

Try gparted.

Its Linux based disk partitioning utility which would overwrite almost anything.

But before that, check the hard disk by running manufacturer's utility. Maybe the hard disk itself is bad.

 

ya

Thanks for the reply, I hadnt tried gparted, but the hard drive had passed all seagate for seatools tests. which is why i even posted, I assumed the drive was bad, but it tested ok.

 

You have backed up your data and can completely wipe the hard disk. I recommend that you use the SeaTools utility to "format the first 32MB of the drive" (I think that is what it says ). That will remove the boot sector and MBR.

Windows Disk Management should then see the HDD as unallocated or you could set it up using Seagate DiskWizard.