HP Pavilion ze4400, been around for 4 years.
Just a couple of days ago, comp stopped booting properly. I tried the quick restore to restore to factory settings but it would always end at 80ish percent with a write error.
Tried the windows xp operating system cd. when formatting the partition it always freezes at the same place.
Any ideas?
thanks.
Your drive has developed some (at least one) bad spots. It happens to laptop drives far more than desktops.
"Best" thing to do?
Replace the drive. You may want to also grab a $10-15 USB enclosure and use this drive for less critical tasks, such as a BIG OLE' jump drive.
Second best (again, just my opinion), down load the diagnostic/preparation utility from the mfg. of the hard drive, and run everything on it. You can likely mark the bad spots, and continue with little risk if it only finds a few "spots"; if there are lots, see "Best" thing to do.
Finally, a "just make it work" for now solution that has worked for me; when running the XP setup, create your partition to be less than the entire drive. If it's crapping out at 80%, as you say, you can probably get away with a partition that is 80% of the spec'd capacity. Try, say, 50-60% just to see if it works for you. Then you can spend as much time as it's worth to you, repeatedly trying larger partitions till it trips on the bad spot.
I've got a 30 gig, partitioned to 27 gig in a USB encl. that I've used for shuttling and 2nd copies for a couple years now.
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