Member Avatar for julz1

I got a nasty little virus so I deleted my hard drive but I restarted my pc before it finished formatting (STUPID) now I cant format it at all when I go into set up windows XP it believes the disc isn't in the machine when it is. Can anyone help?

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An interrupted format can leave either a damaged partition table/MBR or a disk the installer simply cannot talk to. That fits the symptom described. and pointed to sensible first checks; below are practical, different next steps that have helped in cases like this.

If the motherboard sees the drive but Setup refuses it, the usual cause is a controller/driver mismatch (common with SATA/AHCI on older XP installers). Two reliable fixes are: use the F6 driver-load route during XP setup (requires the controller driver on floppy), or create a slipstreamed XP installation CD that includes the SATA/AHCI driver (tools such as nLite). Alternatively, boot a small rescue environment (GParted Live, any Linux live CD/USB or a WinPE/BartPE disk) and inspect the disk—create a new msdos partition table and a primary NTFS partition to make the disk usable again. If you can boot a rescue disk you can also run the manufacturer’s bootable diagnostics (SeaTools, WD Data Lifeguard, etc.) to confirm a hardware fault.

If the drive does not appear to the motherboard at all, that points to power/cable/controller or drive failure; manufacturer diagnostics are the next step. If data matters, stop destructive attempts and consider professional recovery. If the drive is visible but the OS/installer still fails, using a rescue environment to run fixmbr/fixboot (Windows Recovery Console or WinPE) or to zero and recreate the partition table will usually restore an installer-visible disk and allow a clean reinstall.

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Member Avatar for Bob_180_Bob

I have no idea what you are saing about stopping before formatting finnished but if you boot your PC and start from your CD with the XP disk in the drive windows should format your drive before a fresh installation of XP. You obversly have access to another PC so you could put your hard drive in it and format it there.

Member Avatar for abhisdm

Go to bios setup and see if the disk is gettin detected there... if yours is a SATA disk try to plug into different ports and see... if this doesn't work then last thing is put ur disk into another computer in slave mode and format...

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