Removing overlay from Maxtor harddrive

[Garathor]

I have a 6Y080P0 80GB Maxtor harddrive. Until now i have used it in an old computer (PII 400 mhz...) as my boot drive (primary master, with win98 installed). The BIOS in the old computer couldn't detect drives larger than 30GB, so i used the MaxBlast 3 CD to boot and installed the overlay. (I also used maxblast to make 2 partitions on the drive). Then everything worked fine. Now i got my new computer. It has a 6Y160M0 160GB Maxtor S-ATA harddrive as boot drive, with Windows XP installed. I wanted to use my 80GB Maxtor harddrive in my new computer as well, so i connected it as secondary master (my CD-Writer is primary master). Since i no longer need the overlay, i booted from the MaxBlast 3 CD to remove it. But the option to remove the overlay was greyed out, i couldn't select it. When i run MaxBlast 3 in windows it says "MaxBlast 3 has detected that the only drive in your system is the Windows drive.....", even though both my Maxtor harddrives are installed. They are both accessible in "my computer", even both the partitions of the 80GB harddrive. So how do i remove the overlay from my 80GB harddrive?

[Leoslocks]

You might have to remove the CD rom drive and install the 80 gig drive(Only) as master on that cable.

A "0" fill would remove everything from the drive, including all data.

MaxBlast may be seeing the 80 gig drive as a bootable OS drive also, hence not letting you overwrite it.

[Garathor]

If a "0" fill is a simple way to solve this, i will do that (i do not care about the data on the drive). Any hints on how do this fast and easy?

[Garathor]

I used maxblast 3 to do a zero fill. First i intended to do a complete one. I waited for several minutes, but the progressbar was still on less than 1%. So i did a quick zero fill instead (just the 63 first sectors). Will that be enough in my case? Have i successfully removed the overlay?

[wonderinguy34]

The overlay resides in the MBR (master boot record) if the zero fill doesn't affect the MBR a fdisk /mbr will.

[s4]

There is a program called aefdisk that you can find at download.com that will do this easily. It is a commandline program. Just be sure to tell it which drive you want a new mbr on. 1=C, 2=D, etc. Fdisk only writes a new mbr to the C drive if I remember correctly.