How can I format laptop harddrive when dos format commands fails?

[rw409168]

Greetings,

My friend has a Dell laptop running Vista which has a dodgy hard drive.

I had planned to reinstall vista on the laptop, formatting the drive (2 partitions) via the included Dell vista recovery cd.

However it fails when choosing the option to format the partitions, hard drive error.

I then rebooted and choose to run the command prompt -> format c: from the boot up disk.

One partition formatted without a problem the other is stuck at 1 percent completed and has been running for 5hrs+

Are there any options for me to format the drive in another way?

Thanks
Rob

 

[goombawaho]

I forgot the CLOSE QUOTE after good as new" above. The rest, after that, is my comment.

 

[kjv1611]

True, I'm sure it CAN happen. I've thought about it, considered it, and have chosen so far not to worry about it. Most of the folks I help, I know. That doesn't make it any safer, necessarily.

Anyway, I'll definitely think about the record keeping thing - already thought about doing, but just never went through with those thoughts. Maybe some day.

 

[edfair]

Understand the concerns, but I've been taking things to the house (or warehouse when I had it) to work on for nearly 40 years without issues. Well, other than taking them home doesn't guarantee any more of a fix than working on the equipment on site.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.