My OS's boot fine & all programs run OK also. I went to use Partition Magic to increase a partition size, but it reports a bad partition table & won't continue. I ran another utility program & it analyzed & reported that the partition table may be corrupt. I deleted all partitions & then restored them 1 by 1 from back-ups, but both programs still report a bad partition table. Years ago, I had an option in the BIOS to do a "low-level" HDD format, but I don't find any such options in my current BIOIS. Searching Computing.net for a solution, I saw one problem wherein somebody responded suggesting to do a FDISK /MBR. Would this be a reasonable solution for my problem? I assume that could not be run from within XP. Would FDISK from any bootable DOS be acceptable? Or would XP need to be booted from installation media? I have backups to restore form if FDISK /MBR would delete all the partitions. Any advice and / or other ideas would be appreciated.

Hi, Fdisk /MBR only repairs the MASTER BOOT RECORD. Will not repair the partition table. Fdisk to repartition should have fixed it. Fdisk and Format of each partition should do the job. There are download programs that claim to repair the partition table. Low Level format is done at the factory and there is usually no need to do it again. There are lots of free downloads purporting to do a Low Level Format. They really only zero all bytes similar to Low Level. If you want to try it MADBOOT has a zero writer on the disk. Good Luck, Jim

If PM is insstalled go to "PM TOOLS/Partitioninfo" , what does it display ? Or run "Partin.exe" off of the cd. How many and what type of partitions are on the hdd? If you have extended partitions the problem may be it the volume partition tables.