Nergal:
Your question, "Does this still occur if you format the drive the attempt to wipe it" set me on the path to fixing my problem (Give your self a gold star). I used a bootable Super F Disc to check the old 250 gig Maxtor IDE HHD. After running Sup[er F Disc it reported that the partion was larger than the physical size of the drive, Don't under stand how that happened amd still allowed me to move all the exiting files to a larger HHD I had laying around. To fix the drive, I removed the MBR, made re-partioned the drive and re-formated (the program would only let me format Fat32) the