track 0 problems - zero-length partition?

[Graeme M Bailey]

Greetings from Far North Queensland Australia,

While trying to access a new storage HDD
I got a message saying that I had found a bug in parted
and to email you people with
the version (1.6.3) and...
"Assertion (dev->length > 0) at linux.c:697 
in function init_file() failed"

I have a Seagate ST340014A hard disk drive
with a possible corrupted track zero.
The drive seems to have acquired a zero-length partition?

Originally I tried to install the drive in an older Pentium II 266
using all possible options... all unsuccessful.

I tried then to use Ontrack DDO overlay
in a win98 system, which also didn't work...
so then I tried to clean the disk by writing zeros...

Now neither Linux nor windoze will let me access the disk

The linux (RH9) kernel log reported:

hdd: [DM6:DDO] [remap +63] [4111/255/63]hdd: dma_intr: status=0x51 {
DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdd: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=63, high=0,
low=63, sector=0

the actual parameters of the disk are:
(I think) 19158 16 255
the LBA version is 4865 255 63
and with the limiting jumper
4111 255 63

I was hoping to be able to fix the problem
without returning the drive
(I'm more that 100km west of Cairns)
but don't know how to get the system to recognise
the disk so that I can reformat it.

best regards
Graeme