I had a virus, cleaned it, but my computer is messed up. I cant load XP back on a new partitioned drive; when i get to the agree part and press F8 to accept; it does nothing, so i have to ESC and it gets out. Part of the 1st sector of the drive has been scrambled, most likely the config.sys as far as i can tell. i've used just about every recovery software out there, but they show no active partition either. I put a partition on the new 1tb drive and cloned my 500gb drive over to the clean drive, but it still had the same damage (of course) any ideas would be appreciated.
disconnect the power to the 500gig drive and any usb/card reader devices.
be prepared to supply the system drivers for xp
boot the xp cd via the bios
when you get to the part that says which partition you want to install to delete the partition [using L] and then recreate the partition.
Choose it to install to and complete the xp installation.