instead of going thru a ton of crap and ending up with wasting your time, get the guy to buy you a new drive.. No I am not an MS fan, its sad how many recalls and problems are happening with their products, and how they are forcing Vista(in my idea worse than Win NT 4.0) on almost every commercial computer sold, including the laptop my mother bought half a year ago, and doesn't want me to reformat it and stick XP SP2 on it.