What? Harddrive

[cubmasterken]

I'm trying to repair daughter's computer. Reformated hard drive and tried to install XP home, install stopped at first reboot and had to be restarted from scratch. After third attemp hard drive not visable to BIOS. All cables checked and double checked and new cable used. Put harddrive in another machine, could not fdisk or format even for 98. Used Linux utility (qtparted) and saw harddrive but couldnot format. Then used Western Digital utility to low level format (wrote entire disk with zeros). Tried Win 98 and fat32 and OS stopped at first reboot again and finally hid hard drive again. Thinking I may have malware present. If so, how do I clean harddrive? and can it infect BIOS. Haven't seen anything like this since CIH virus, but this affects 98 and XP??? Somewhat afraid to try new harddrive.

 

[Ste]

First of all you should never low level format a drive, its done at MAnufacturer and secondly the harddrive is probably bad. Meaning buy a new one. No good drive is that much trouble.