Hard Disk Failure

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m3incorp

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Now that I have determined that the hard drive is bad, can I just buy a new hard drive and use the restore discs that came with the computer? Or do I have to buy a copy of Win XP? The computer is less than a year old and had WinXP installed on it.
 
In my thread below titled WinXP won't start, I went through all the steps that I tried. It begain with my son bringing his computer to me with a black screen that stated "Disk failure, insert system disk.. When inserting a Win XP disc, it would go in to setup and return the error that the disk was not accesible. I went on to put the hard drive in my computer as a slave and it in explorer in only showed one folder and it was Recovery with nothing in it. I cloned my hard drive to this hard drive and then removed mine and this hard drive would still not boot. I tried formatting the harddrive while it was in my computer and it stated that "format was unsuccesful and that the disk appears to have failed and may need replacing". Put it back in the original computer and it boots to a screen that says choose command prompt and run scandsk. While trying this it states windows is shutting down to prevent harm to the computer. Keep in mind that his Restore disk are about 500 miles from here and I will be going there in two days. Thus my question as to they will work with a new hard drive. Any suggestions, if you think the hard drive is OK. Please see my other thread for details. Thanks.
 
i had this same problem last night. my dad helped me EXACTLY LIKE YOU ARE HELPING YOUR SON, so i guess there are many dad's helping there sons all around the world. ok this is what you have to do. put it back into your computer as a slave, and then right click on your son's hard disk and format it. after you do that, put it back into his and insert a startup disk that has fdisk.exe in it. fdisk.exe and delete the old partition, and create a new one and BE SURE TO SET IT AS ACTIVE. reboot your computer and insert win 98, or ME if you have either. hope i helped, i had the same problem last night. except my computer was foolin with me, telling me that i couldn't delete a partition because it had logical drives and when i said show the logical drives, it said there where no logical drives to show, but hopefully you won't have that problem. tell me how it went, :)
 
I tried to format the hard drive in my computer as a slave. While trying to format it showed the error that the disk was defected and may need to be replaced.
 
your hard drive is more than likely dead. use your restore cd's to reinstall when you are done, activate windows. if it won't let you, call the number that it give you and tell them your situation, they will give you a new number.
 
m3incorp said:
I tried to format the hard drive in my computer as a slave. While trying to format it showed the error that the disk was defected and may need to be replaced.

well in that case you're right its dead, passed on, deseased, living the high life....
 
There may be hope yet. I used Win98 boot disk and was able to format and partition. Although it does show this 80 Gig hard drive to be 10 Gig. I'll work through that if I get Win XP to load. I will keep everyone informed.
 
yes go ahead and use your restore discs on a new hard drive, that should pose no problems unless your old hard disk has hidden data partitions used as an answer file for the restoration program. to fix your 10GB limitation try using a winME startup disk from bootdisk.com and read this article:

Fdisk Does Not Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263044
 
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