On Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:26:02 +0100, "Mark"
<markantispam@orange.fr> wrote:


>The aim of low level format for me (knowing that it writes zeros) is for it
>to remove the MBR, since I thought that my install difficulties

What install difficulties? You seem to have left the
details of this important issue out of the posts, unless I
missed it.


>... might come
>from there (perhaps a MBR virus) and because although each time I installed
>I removed and reformatted the partition concerned, problems persisted.

I doubt you have an MBR virus, for one thing if you boot the
CD instead of the hard drive (to install windows), the virus
could not load so there is no chance windows won't have
written it's MBR in place of the virus.



>
>In particular, I was getting a message [during install] saying that a line
>in a file was corrupt and I could not understand this, since for me there
>was nothing on the drive.

What do you mean "for me there was nothing on the drive"?
If you are installing windows, how can there "for you", not
be anything on the drive since that's what an installation
of windows does, writes files to the drive?

However, even if it wasn't writing to the drive at the time,
a line in a file could mean anything, the files on the CD
for example if your system is instable and it corrupts
something read into memory that was a file on the CD.

I suggest you back up and fully describe the problem because
it seems you are guessing about things and not telling us
the whole story.



>No as I said above, I removed all partitions and recreated. Removing a
>partition must by definition remove any Windows installation (c:\windows)
>but not the MBR

You do not need to remove partitions. Use the partition you
have unless you had some reason to believe it was not
creating properly, initially. We dont' even know anything
about the system though, for all we know it could be a 200GB
HDD on a system that can't support a drive that large.



>OK. Again, the point is to be sure that when installing on a "second hand
>drive" is that its clean. However I dont know if a "normal" format writes
>zeros or not.


Would you please not talk about partitions or MBR anymore
until you have started at the beginning and described the
system, described the method of installing windows, and then
described exactly when you have a problem and what is
onscreen at the time?

A normal format does not write zeros, it creates a
filesystem, and optionally (or by default) checks the drive.


>What is the difference between a drive straight out of the
>factory and a drive / disk that can store files?

Depends on what the factory did. Assuming nothing, that the
drive storing files has a partition table with at least one
partition defined, that partition being formatted so the
operating system which you try to write a file with, can
understand it and write to it.


>What is the difference
>between FAT and NTFS?

Enough that it is not worth getting into, it's not the
problem.


>There is one, so a format must be more than just
>zeros, and zeros are just to ensure that the disk is "clean" and then
>recreate and format after.

If you want a tutorial of hard drive logical structures
there are some found via google, but you're drifting WAY
down a tangent instead of starting at the beginning. Maybe
you did start there but you haven't told us that, instead of
these questions which don't seem like a likely avenue to
solve the problem (whatever it may be).


What is the history of the system? Has it ran previously,
stabily? What's been changed on it since then if it had?
Is it new and if so, have you checked the basics like that
fans are operational, nothing is overheating, ran memtest86+
for several hours to rule out memory errors?

System instability, not hard drive MBR or formatting, is a
far more common source of installation problems. Windows
can check (and does) whether your hard drive is ready for
the installation. It can format the drive too. Once it has
begun copying files, that you should not be concerned about
anymore. At that point it could be a disc read error (you
might put the CD in another system and see if you can copy
off all the files to rule that out) but generally it is a
system instability, or maybe some bios bug.