I tried this again, but ended up exactly the same. It appeared that PW had deleted the partition listed as NTFS, but not the one lated unallocated. When I applied the changes, it said that it was successful, but when I rebooted back to PW, the partitions still remained. Going in circles is causing my head to spin.
If there really is a hardware problem involved, I think that the only choice that I have is to move the harddrive to my primary rig for both partition cleaning and installation, and then move it back, hoping that the problem doesn't effect it. I kind of have a hunch that this may be caused by a defective BIOS or bad chip, because it won't retain the CMOS settings on shutdown. I have a chip ordered, so hopefully that will provide a solution in a few days when it arrives.
Something is awry, because when I select to delete a partition, there is no OK involved, until after I select the Apply button. It is treating the unallocated space as a partition, but if I understand, undesignated space should be labeled as free space instead. Whatever the case, when selecting the partition, selecting delete, selecting the apply button, selecting the OK button, it always goes through all of the steps that makes it appear that it has done the job, but when I reboot right back into PW...or for that matter, every other program that I have tried, it shows the partition structure unchanged. I even tried the wipe function, but that didn't work either.
I have performed this type of operation many times in the past, and never had these kind of problems. I'm going to discontinue this until I move the harddrive as described, and if there are any other problems wait until the BIOS chip arrives, and if that doesn't solve this, I'll start talking to Seagate about a RMA.
Did you try running Seatools DOS CD to diagnose/repair drive?
Then maybe zero to force installer
No, but I did try it on a floppy. Would there be a difference?
I am suspicious of floppy drives remaining in any machine as have seen them interfere with Win7 installation repeatedly.
Try unplugging and ridding it in all settings in BIOS.
Were you able to zero HD using Seatools?
Having a floppy didn't interfere with W7's installation on my primary rig, and many of the programs that I have tried to use, which had the problems were on DVDs, not floppies. I will keep what you say in mind, and if it appears to me that this might be an issue, then I will disconnect it (temporarily).
As far as Seatools goes, I didn't see any function for zeroing in it, but that may be due to the fact that I made those floppies quite some time ago, and there may be much more up to date downloads available...I'll check.
I've been trying to download SeaTools For DOS, but whether I select the floppy version or the CD version, instead of a download, it just displays a webpage full of code. If this is anything like what I have seen on occassion, perhaps copying the page to a text file and then burning it to a CD might work, but I have doubts. I think that their download page is broken.
See if this one works any better: BenchmarkHQ
No. When I selected the download, it just gave a webpage full of code, just as before.
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