Like I said, I would use a machine I don't care about to gain more knowledge about the hard drive in question. Once I see the extent of the damage I can determine the solution. Until then we do not know the cause of this problem. Was it a virus or a bad spot on the disk?
red-dawg <-- MCSE and hardware technician since 1984.
Even if it is a virus, as long as you don't boot from the drive (boot sector infection), or execute an infected file, you are safe. I've never heard or seen a virus that propogates itself during a partition table read.