IBM R31 Laptop Reformat gone bad

[Pepsiboy700]

Ok well its almost about to be the 4th ibm ive seen die this year. Its a IBM R31 Laptop that im trying to fix for a friend. The problem that it had was first of it wasnt windows xp, which is what it was sold with, it had 2000 but the ibm recovery was 98. Anyway it would go to boot and get a blue screen saying something bout checksum. So i took the hd out and stuck it into pc and reformated it. Whats weird is the recovery ibm program was still on and it wouldnt install windows from laptop. Finally i fdisked it and now it doesnt show up and comes up on the laptop as bad nfts or something like that. Any ideas. Im trying to install windows xp.

 

[Pepsiboy700]

bump

 

[Win2kpatcher]

You are sure it is formatted correctly? After you ran an FDISK on the drive what did you format it with NTFS? Can you see this laptop drive on your desktop? If you can see it on your desktop and move files to it etc etc..then we can at least pin point it to being a local problem with the laptop and not so much with the hard drive.

That partition is a utility partition that you were seeing. They usually have some good factory trouble shooting tools.

 

[Pepsiboy700]

how do i boot to dos to go to fdisk

 

[Pepsiboy700]

heres what im getting out of you. Go to fdisk some how and format ntfs and it should let me install windows? IDK if i know how to get to dos i know how to fix this.

 

[Win2kpatcher]

Just format on your machine like you did before. This way it shows up as a drive on your desktop then you can just right clik on it and click FORMAT or if its not showing up under my computer after the FDISK you ran then you may have to initialize the disk via right-clicking on My Computer>Manage>Disk Management.

 

[tariqadkhan]

from what i gather u are having problems reformatting the drive, i ran into aproblem where the laptop was running like crap bcoz i change the file format from FAT32 to NTFS. eventually had to change it back wen i figured out that, that may be the problem. wat i suggest is try to format the drive with FAT32 since it seems to be an old laptop, 2000 and 98! so try it an see wat happens