Disaster strikes

[Lemon law]

I had a very stable computer until it got squirrely about a month ago, I was almost totally confident it was not malware, but after posting reliably, it seemed to often fail to load drivers as it booted to windows. I ran memtest 86 and my memory is fine.

Well today it finally happened, it will not load windows, as it lost Xp's config sys, it will not boot to safe mode, no back up config sys still exists , no nothing.

So I bit the bullet, nuked the drive by reformatting NTFS, and windows sez that Sata 1 drive is basically toast as I tried to reformat the drive, and I can't reinstall windows.

So its new HDD time, I know my mobo will support Sata 2, but all the drives are now Sata 3.5
complaint.

Am I going to need new cables and a Sata 2 only drive??

And I also note the drive has a 8 MB partition I have not yet reformatted, could it be my trouble and what does that small partition do?

Its an 80 GB Western digital about 4 years old, and no I do not need a larger capacity drive.
The OS I am trying to reinstall is win XP pro.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Using any of the new sata drives will be fine. I believe the 8 mb is for boot instructions that type of thing.

 

[Lemon law]

Thank you for the reply. Now any recommendations on the best small sata drive to get?

 

[Dahak]

for brand of drive, does not really matter, personally I tend to use WD's or Seagates. The 8MB is reserved space that windows allocates in case you want to switch the drive from basic to dynamic as it stores the dynamic info in that 8mb