Recently while helping a friend solve a hard drive failure, I hit upon a possible solution that worked. He had reformated the drive, wiped it clean, filled it with all zeros but could not get it to load windows or fix with recovery programs. I told him to take out the ram card and try again. He never thought about the ram. It was a lucky guess on my part and the PC is now back up and running and windows installed and recovery discs worked to bring the whole system back. Remember things go to ram first then to the system drive. Hope this helps someone else.