OT: parbreastion troubles

First off, its not a Dell :-} but i`m wondering if one of you chaps might have come across this scenario before and resolved it.

I have an 80Gb Seagate drive which had 4 parbreastions (10Gb and the rest split near enough equally). I made a backup of my boot drive (4Gb) and dumped it onto the 80Gb drive. I (foolishly) opted not to let the backup program resize the backup to the parbreastion size as it went, thinking i`d be able to do it later.

Upon booting with my normal boot drive, the 3 "upper" parbreastions are still visible, but the first parbreastion is obviously smaller than it should be. Nothing on the Hirens Boot CD can alter the first parbreastion as it says there is a parbreastion table error, so i`ve effectively lost the space between the "new" parbreastion size and the original parbreastion size (about 5Gb worth)

Seagate drive utils can't touch it, nor can anything else i`ve thrown at it (i`ve even tried filling the disk with 0's to allow a proper full reparbreastion) - I-O errors or unable to write sector 129 follow (although one util started to give a much longer list of errors).

The drive has (had) no bad sectors prior to dropping the backup of the parbreastion into place.

I had backups, so I deleted the upper parbreastions via XP's "manage disk" dialogue (was unable to wipe the first due to the above problems) and have reparbreastioned the remaining "visible" 70Gb as a single drive, reformatted, and XP can use either quite happily.

I've tried several versions of fdisk, Parbreastion Magic, Ranish, delpart, and anything else I could find - including an old Seagate app that should low-level format any drive. No dice - either the apps crash out immediately with I-O errors or refuse to see the disk at all.

I didn`t think it was possible to completely trash a parbreastion table in this way, but it would appear i`ve managed it... whether its overwritten the drive geometry descriptors or something I don`t know, but it wouldn`t explain why the other parbreastions can still be accessed.

Any thoughts ? (buy a new drive springs to mind...)

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