Hiren's Boot CD should help you here.

Yep.

Whats that?

A bootable CD that contains about 200 utilities for diagnostics and repair.

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

I've haven't had that happen since before Win XP.

You did something wrong there.

By the way, in addition to Hiren's, I've also used this one:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Honestly though, if you have another Windows system that you've put this drive in, stop trying to repair it and just copy all the files over.

Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset. It's a boot disk like Hirens that will fix most Windows boot problems.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I think I'll just take both systems home to work on. I don't have an CD / DVDs here which I plan to correct. I'll make recovery disks and try to recover.

I'll also use my clone duplicator to clone both drives to a couple new WD green 2TB drives and then retire these as backups.

I was just hoping for an easy way to reset the drive but windows isn't real friendly for that type of thing.

Thanks Fish where can I come by one of these?

You running Win7 32-bit or 64-bit?

And are you interested in a paid version or a slightly less moral version?

Here's a start: http://mythoughtsonit.com/2010/11/ho...overy-toolset/

Want to think about that one? You're taking a known unstable drive and you want to use it as a backup? So that way when the active drive dies you have a lower probability of having a viable backup?

I commend you for wanting to do backups, but unless you're using it for a real short rotation then I'd just overwrite the drive with 0s and toss it.

+1

That would be my recommendation too unless you were certain that the original issue was Windows and not the HDD itself.

If you get to windows startup repair, would guess the hard drive is okay. If you have the windows 7 CD, or download one, I would try booting into that and choosing repair mode. The start using the bootsec commands (I forget what they all are, but google bootsec nt60), won't touch data or programs but attempt to repair any problems with booting as it will create a whole new mbr.

EDIT: I should include this should be done in the original computer.