HD problem sayin hd is no good but this is 2nd one need adv.

[guwangeowns]

Well my friend lives kinda far away. He started having problems with it after some guy messed with it. So he brought it out to me. This guy had put another stick of ram in it (which was one of the problems stopping it from booting). then i went to do a os reinstall and it said the hd was corrupted. So he bought another HD i put that one in and when windows goes to partition it, it says it can't do it its possibly corrupted again crap.

So i tried using different ide cables set it to cable select and master etc etc.
Keep getting the same message. Any suggestions as to what i can try? I've kinda ran out of options here its a old pentium 4 dell machine.512 ram he bought a new 100 pata seagate 160 gig drive from best buy.
any suggestions would be great help.

thx in adv.

 

[Blind_Arrow]

and this all is happening after new RAM upgrade?

 

[guwangeowns]

no that was a problem but i took that out. the other guy who had "messed" with this machine put that in. I took that stick out and got past the error that was giving.

But then i got a error message saying the harddrive was corrupted.
Tried switching cables around etc just to make sure. Then my friend went out and bought a new harddrive. When the win xp install get to 20% for partitioning the drive it stops and says the drive is corrupted or something is wrong. I tried switching cables etc etc with this drive still same message.
So looking for any advice i was wondering if this drive is actually "no good" or if there is something else possibly wrong with this machine thats causing that.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

You could try to use a windows 98 floppy disk and type fixdisk at the A:. Then delete all partitions and then make a new primary partition. May work.