Weird drive label characters

It started with the system freezing when print was selected.
Then the AVG antivirus displayed an error message at startup.
Then the system was freezing in explorer.
Then things just got worse. frequent lockups, real slow etc.
I decided to fresh install the whole shabang (XP) on a freshly formatted
HDD.
My first step was to fdisk and remove all the partitions. I even
'Zeroboot'ed the drive and formatted the MBR.. When I checked, there was
still a primary DOS drive with about 8meg on it! This label was made up of
a string of unusual characters EG: Y??[a?%ôôFY/.. (this is not exactly
the way it was but something like it). I tried to delete it but it wanted
confirmation of the drive label. I tried to format it but it returned
messages that said it was trying to recover sectors. This went on for a
while and eventually it gave up and aborted. Of course I could not duplicate
the weird characters so I had to employ other means to delete it. Fdisk,
partition magic wouldn't work. I ended up using a 'debug' routine and
eventually got rid of it. The link is here if you are interested. It save my
day:
http://www.computerhope.com/rdebug.htm
Could this have been the result of a virus/trogan attack? I mean all the
prior symptoms, the creation of another partition and drive? And why was it
so hard to delete?
Any suggestions, similar experiences are welcome.
tRev - (just another back yard computer junkie.)
Win XP on 40 gig Maxtor 256meg DDR, P4 1.8ghz, nVidia mx400 graphics.

"tRevHead" wrote in message
u...
It started with the system freezing when print was selected.
Then the AVG antivirus displayed an error message at startup.
Then the system was freezing in explorer.
Then things just got worse. frequent lockups, real slow etc.
I decided to fresh install the whole shabang (XP) on a freshly formatted
HDD.
My first step was to fdisk and remove all the partitions. I even
'Zeroboot'ed the drive and formatted the MBR.. When I checked, there was
still a primary DOS drive with about 8meg on it! This label was made up
of
a string of unusual characters EG: Y??[a?%ôôFY/.. (this is not exactly
the way it was but something like it). I tried to delete it but it wanted
confirmation of the drive label. I tried to format it but it returned
messages that said it was trying to recover sectors. This went on for a
while and eventually it gave up and aborted. Of course I could not
duplicate
the weird characters so I had to employ other means to delete it. Fdisk,
partition magic wouldn't work. I ended up using a 'debug' routine and
eventually got rid of it. The link is here if you are interested. It save
my
day:
http://www.computerhope.com/rdebug.htm
Could this have been the result of a virus/trogan attack? I mean all the
prior symptoms, the creation of another partition and drive? And why was
it
so hard to delete?

It sounds like you had a boot sector virus, but I haven't seen those
critters around in ages. Generally, you'll get those from infected removable
media. There is also the possibility Windows had a really bad hair day and
made a mess, but that wouldn't explain the wayward partition.

In my experience, using the DEBUG approach is always the best if you want to
be assured you are starting from scratch. Glad you found it on your own -
saved me the time of digging out my notes and retyping it for the umteenth
time.