Have a hp computer that has gone toes up. Think it is the hdd, but not sure.
here is what happened. turn the unit on and it started to spool up then went into recycle mode. wounld not load up windows. tryed to restart in safe mode, nothing there, would not load up. tryed to do a restore, no luck, went then to recovery, and started recovery. Formattef hdd ok, and it started transferring windows files, got to 4% and started having trouble opening files. Tryed to restart recovery again and it did the same thing, on the third retry, got message that users partion could not be formatted and unit went in shutdown.
Is this a hdd problem or processor failure.? Don't knom enough about bios to mess with it so i don't.
Need help!!:'(

Try fdisk first THEN format.
I take it you're running setup from a I386 folder. Seems like a memory prob. w/your 4%. Either use the original disc to boot with or use a floppy running the MSDOS extender, i.e. smartdrv.exe. Be sure that the orig. disc is clean, read errors are usually due to a dirty disc if there isn't anything obvious such a damaged disc.

Don't have an original disk, Ido have a boot floppy but don't know enough about dos for it to me me any good. are you talking hdd disk or cd when you say dirty disk?

Do not use fdisk. If you delete your recovery partition and/or wipe your MBR you will nto be able to reinstall the OS!

I think your hard disk is dead/damaged and therefore so is the recovery partition. I think youre looking at a hard disk or os (or more easialy , a new pc)

Sorry it has taken me so lone ro get back at you, you have came to the same line of opinion that i have. Shot hdd, and get new one.
Thanks for the help guys.

fyi:
disc = cd, dvd, etc.
disk = hard drive
diskette = floppy, etc.

unless you're into a hi-tech boat anchor there's nothing you can do with a dead HD but circular file it. most the files can be recovered but that's an expensive process and you REALLY gotta have a need for them.

jbennett: from his statement he had already formatted which means that most of the info on the partition is toast anyway, further, he had already overwritten what was previously there.

Got a WD500GB 7200rpm 16mbcache HDD from NEWEGG,com, being as I knew nothing about my computer at the time of my first post, got me a SATA HDD. Opened up the computer and oops wrong HDD. At the time I didn't know the dirrerence between IDE and SATA, went back on line and found out that the most GBs I could get in IDE was 380. Made chose to buy the adapter card(Rosewell, 19.99+ shipping) and installed that. System is back up and running, even though the BIOS doesn't see the new HDD. System scan on startup sees it but the bios says I don't have one, go figure!:-O

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