[ubuntu-uk] Disk Rescue!

[daveg at boavon.plus.com]

Many thanks for the various pieces of advice.

Have just finished booting up an old WIN98 setup CD, using the F8 key
managed to get to a shell prompt where it had loaded a few utils into a
RAMDISK.  FDISK /STATUS showed some partitions.  Deleteing them appeared
to work, but then when trying to write a new partition it just hung again.
 Re-booted and tried again. Similarly the status still showed the
partitions being there - even though I thought I had deleted them. 
Realised, they were just marked for deletion and cos the new partition
hadn't worked they were still there.  This time I deleted and then exited
from FDISK only to receive a disk write error.

All similar symptoms to other methods used so far.

Conclusion:-  Either the disk is well and truly busted OR for reasons I
cannot explain or fix is that the MBR is opened read-only and it is busted
also.

Is'nt there some form of low-level utility which would merely zap the disk
with zeros or something regardless whether it has some form of protection
on it?  I don't need the data and I don't need any software - I can
install o/s afterwards.

Lessons for others to learn: - if you haven't backed up your MDR and/or
taken an image of your disk and it is important to you - do it regularly
before it is too late.