Need help formatting?

[Cntcomplain]

Hi,
I have a laptop HP. To make a long story short, it's dead. Will not boot. I've tried running the recovery disks and booting from the hard drive but all I get is a small blue screen and it tries to start up in safe mode and then the small blue screen pops up and dead again. I tried to run the ediagnostics tools and it says sector not found writing drive C.

HP reffered me to Killdisk.com, but I don't have a floppy drive, only a cd rom/DVD. I copied the file to a CD and tried to run it but nothing. Any help on how I can format the drive and if I do, do you think I will be able to run the recovery CD's.

 

[franklin97355]

Is the computer set to boot from the CD drive? You set this in the CMOS.

 

[linney]

Sounds like the hard drive is u/s.

You could purchase an adapter for the laptop and use it to connect to any desktop's IDE hard drive cable, you might be able to save some data that way.

The laptop's hard drive manufacturer will have free diagnostic software to confirm a failing drive. You will have to get a bootable CD version or make one from the floppy files and third party burning software.

These might be worth a look at too.

You might be able to make use of BartPE (a mini XP self contained on a bootable CD and run from CD) which includes the ChkDsk program which might be worth running. BartPE might be able to read the failing drive and rescue some data if you have someway of saving and storing any data.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder

 

[Cntcomplain]

You mentioned that I could make a bootable CD from the floppy files. How would I do this?

I will check with the manufacter and see if they have anything available. I imagine a new hard drive is quite expensive.

I will post back if I have trouble.

Thanks a bunch for the advice.

Chris

 

[linney]

What third party CD burning software do you (or your friends) have, you need more than what is installed by the XP CD?

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd

You may be surprised how cheap a new hard drive is, the governing factor is size, the smaller the cheaper.

 

[Cntcomplain]

My desktop computer uses Roxio Creator Platinum 5 to burn CD's. Looking at the link that you provided above it says that someone looking to burn 1 bootable CD shouldn't use that. Can I still use it? I can go back to the site and work my way through the instructions if you think it will work with Roxio. If not I could download a trial of Nero. All that is just new to me, kinda over my head it appeared.

Also, where would be a good place to price a new hard drive? I have an xz335 hp pavilion laptop 40Gig HD.

And lastly, would it be more beneficial to go buy a USB Floppy so that I could just boot it from a floppy startup disk? I have a USB JumpDrive but I doubt that would work.

Thanks for you time and help on this.

Chris

 

[Cntcomplain]

I forgot to mention more detail. When I try to run the e-dianostic tools it say's Sector not found writing drive C. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Last night out of the blue, it appeared it was starting up because the blue screen come up asking to run Ckdisk. It run and said it found a few errors. Then it started saying Sector not readable. It started scrolling up from 1-40,000 saying unreadable for about an hour then I had to go to bed and just turned it off.

 

[linney]

Search your Roxio Help Index for making bootable CD's. Yes you can still use Barts site if you want. You probably can use a USB floppy too.

But all the above may be irrelevant as your attempt via ChkDsk seems to confirm a new hard drive is required.

Start looking at your local computer shops.

Here are some common manufacturers

http://www.seagate.com

http://www.maxtor.com

http://www.westerndigital.com

http://www.wdc.com/service/ftp/drives.html

http://www.ibm.com

http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm

http://www.fujitsu.com