Help needed - Vulcan hard drive

[derek@slab.slip.uiuc.edu (Derek Taubert)]

I've replaced my old 40 Meg mechanism (RIP) with a newer Western Digital IDE
drive (40 Meg also), but the firmware (Vulcan gold) is crashing all over the
place because there is garbage written in the spot where there should be
partition information.  I've tried running the part.manager, but it crashes
right away, so I don't seem to have any way to write valid partition
information onto the disk.  I'm going to have my roommate zero the disk on
his Gateway system (and do a media check), but I don't know if that will help
or not.

Any suggestions?

Derek