[jackslap]

replaced acer harddrive , wish to use old drive in other system, need to remove PQservice partition so can clone another drive to it. Thanks for any help.

[augie]

Try Darik's Boot and Nuke. I haven't met a drive that could resist that yet.

[jackslap]

When I cloned the seagate drive I replaced it with, the disk wizard process showed the full disc including PQservice, roughly 160 or slightly less gigs, since I am not cloning from maxtor or seagate I have to use other cloning programs than disk wizard, all show 149 gigs including that nuke program. So I am doing something incorrectly . the source drive is an ide drive and the destination drive is sata, wanting to use it in desktop, is there something more I need to do than cloning and trying to boot from it. keeps saying that there is an error, there are only vista 32 bit, win 7 32 bit and win 7 64 bit on PQservice.

[augie]

Have you tried WD'sData Lifeguard yet? I believe Maxtor merged with them so it should work to bring it back to factory condition.

BTW, I had major issues when I was running an IDE with a SATA, the mobo got confused and only let me boot from the IDE. Suffice it to say that I have given all of my perfectly running IDE's away to a local school, and yes, I used Darik's tools to nuke them first.

[jackslap]

I will be running the sata by itself if successful with cloning, the ide is 20 gigs and half a gig left free, it is wife's and she does no serious computing, just face book and some games but computer is athlon 2500 mhz and should last her a while yet if I can get drive to accept the xp clone, she has no interest at all in upping to vista or win 7. thanks for help and will try your suggestion.

[jackslap]

Success, I nuked the drive one more time, installed it in the computer, formatted it ntfs, downloaded and installed XXclone, it cloned the drive , ide to sata and made it bootable . Slick as an icy road. thanks for suggestions, made me look a little farther. The XXclone program is not for vista or win 7 it says, but it does work well for XP.

[augie]

That's great Ian! You finally got that sucker to behave. Thanks for coming back with your solution.