I have been trying to reformat a hardrive with windows xp. My buddy's Dell laptop wasn't working too good and it was from his old job which had restrictions by an administrative account we didnt have the password to, so i said i would reformat it for him. I have done plenty of them before but this one i am having problems with.

I have tried reformatting it multiple times already and each time it seems like i get a to a different point and receive a different error message. Some have been referring to the hard drive, some referring to certain files when being copied, unable to start operating system, and i have gotten the physical memory dump blue screen multiple times(these messages are not word for word, its just basically what i remember from them).

I deleted all the partitions and started from scratch every time. Sometimes it wont even let me start reformatting, a bunch of times i got as far as the files being copied when it will just crap out on me saying a certain file is corrupt or what not. One time i even got as far as going through the setup for windows xp where they ask you to type in a computer name for your computer but then in the middle with only 20 something minutes remaining, the physical memory dump, blue page popped up.

Can someon help me? I am hoping its not that bad because i have actually gotten as far as the windows xp setup. Maybe i did something wrong or something is wrong with the harddrive...?

It seems as if the HDD is the problem, Can you try using a diff. XP Setup CD?

I actually did use two different XP setup cd's. They both seemed to get to different stages of the reformatting.

Could i have deleted too much when i deleted the partitions? Because i am starting with a raw partition. Is there something i should do to this raw partition?

There is nothing needed in a raw partition, If you have a Bootable XP CD try formatting in from the XP Setup. It should take care of it.

When you say boot in XP setup, do you mean let windows load and do it through windows because i dont have windows on my computer. I deleted everything and now i have nothing.

No, i dont mean from within window, i know that you dont have any OS anymore. Iam talking about the XP Setup process, which guides you to use the format option.

When you format if you are choosing the (Quick) format option this can cause problems, that's why i generally use the long option.

Matt

Yes, Thats right, quick formats just wipes the link records, it does not actually wipes all the data.

I have gone through the setup process multiple times but it has stopped at various points for various reasons. And the first time i tried to reformat, i did not use the quick method and it ended up having a problem so i just tried the quick way the rest because i didnt want to have to wait a long time just for it to not work. i will try the regular way again and see what happens.

here is what u need to do, boot withthe xp cd go to the repair console, run fdisk, check howmany partition are on the hdd, delete all and make one partitions, then do a format. when u get to the install section if it ask to format the partition do the full format.