ok, one day i came home from school to discover that my screen saver on my xp machine had frozen. I was concerned because this usually never happens, and sure enough when i tried to reboot windows i got a blue screen that in a nutshell said "unmountable_boot_drive". so, i though "oh crap, im going to have to reformat again" since i assumed i had a virus or something. well firsti tried to reformat with the xp cd boot-up, when i try to select to install windows from the menu i get another blue screen that says theres a problem with my ntfs.sys file. So im thinking that this is nastier than i thought. So i go to use my western digital boot-up disk (this is a wd 7200 rpm 40gb by the way) and when i try to format it through there i get an error that there is an invalid signature on a partition on my hard drive and i must have the right format before i can install the drive (or format it in this case). it also tells me to use NT disk administrator. well, after this i tried to go into the recovery console on the windows cd again and when i try to initiate that it tells me the original message i got... "unmountable_boot_drive" so im pretty much stuck. So at the moment i cant do anything to fix my drive and i need some suggestions. This seems like it is a software problem because i ran tests on it with that western digital boot disk as well and everything checked out. if anyone can help me out i would appreciate it big time!!!

I've run into this before and had to erase the drive with Ontrack "Data Eraser". This program goes on a single floppy and takes about an hour and a half to low lever (medium) format a 40gb drive and writes all "00" to the drive. Then you can reload XP using your CD. If you can't find a demo copy of this program, email me and I can sent you a 21 day demo.

I've uploaded dlgdiag.zip to my webspace. http://www.cyberus.ca/~danpenny/ Check out the readme's etc. in the zip file. There's no time limit, you can test the drive and write zero's to it if you like. I've used it and it works great. HTH