The first computer i was ever using was a Commodore 64, which has no hard drive at all, just 5 1/4 floppies and a little RAM.
My first comp with a hard drive had a 2.5GB hard drive running Windows 3.1
Ouch Juanzo, 800MB was probably quite expensive then. some virus infections can really mess up boot sectors. Still, good old FDisk and reformat should have been able to fix it.
Pre IDE days you had to do a real low-level format before even using FDISK and then regular format.
I don't think you can low-level format IDE drives, but maybe you can.