My hard drive recently was "eaten" by a program in windows but lets not go there

i need to reinstall windows and linux but when i put in the slackware9.1 cd and enter cfdisk it says "bad primary partition, partition begins after end-of-disk" can anyone help?

ive tried reformatting the drive under ntfs and fat32 but it still comes up as the same error even the dos version of fdisk gives me an error and i cant make a new partition or anything HELP ME THIS IS URGENT

You just have a corrupted partition table or there is no existing partition table. You can try to use gpart to figure out where the partitions are and use parted to write the partition table. You can change partitions as many times you want. It should not screw up the data because it is just soft data store at a certain location on the hard drive. If you do not care about your data, as su or root type "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1". cfdisk will complain. Just hit the key that it says to continue. You can then make partitions.

thanx a lot il try that and i hope it works cuz i really need a computer
no i dont care about whats on the drive cuz ive formated it multiple times now and all i want is to partition it
thanks alot

OMG thanks so much it worked and i was almost gonna take it to a proffesionall thanks so much you saved me like 200$