Many thanks for the various pieces of advice. Have just finished booting up an old WIN98 setup CD, using the F8 key managed to get to a shell prompt where it had loaded a few utils into a RAMDISK. FDISK /STATUS showed some partitions. Deleteing them appeared to work, but then when trying to write a new partition it just hung again. Re-booted and tried again. Similarly the status still showed the partitions being there - even though I thought I had deleted them. Realised, they were just marked for deletion and cos the new partition hadn't worked they were still there. This time I deleted and then exited from FDISK only to receive a disk write error.
All similar symptoms to other methods used so far. Conclusion:- Either the disk is well and truly busted OR for reasons I cannot explain or fix is that the MBR is opened read-only and it is busted also. Is'nt there some form of low-level utility which would merely zap the disk with zeros or something regardless whether it has some form of protection on it? I don't need the data and I don't need any software - I can install o/s afterwards. Lessons for others to learn: - if you haven't backed up your MDR and/or taken an image of your disk and it is important to you - do it regularly before it is too late. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
