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reformatting xp hard drive - interrupted

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by ehosto

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I did a stupid thing. I was reformatting a hard drive on a DELL machine for a co-worker. XP Home machine. The reformat was taking ALL DAY and I mean, ALL DAY. This co worker had received this machine from a friend for free. All orginal disks with it. Anyway, I interrupted the formatting of the drive (IDE) and now, I cannot get the machine to boot up from CD again. All I get is: cannot load OS. This is from the original OS CD in the drive!! Also am getting a KB error which the KB works fine and a Memory error stating that the memory has changed in the system and it has not. Any help is appreciated. I know, I did a stupid thing.

5 replies

by thumbsup2

If you were reformatting the hard drive to begin with, then you've lost all on the drive. Just start over and format it again, this time letting it finish. You may need to FDISK to delete all partitions to make sure the installation can see that there's nothing on the drive and needs to be formatted. If you have an old Win98 boot floppy, boot from it and use the FDISK command to delete all partitions.

by ehosto

I will try your suggestion also. Thanks for your reply

by nicknielsen

you have found the reason the PC was given away. Some suggestions to see if you can recover:

1. Open the case and (very carefully) remove and reinsert (a piece at a time) the memory and processor.

2. Disconnect and reconnect (again, one end at a time) all drive cables and power cables. While doing this on the hard drive, identify the manufacturer (Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate, etc.)

3. Boot the PC and enter setup (should be able to press F1 or F12 and do this). Reset the BIOS to the factory defaults. Save and exit the BIOS.

4. Download the appropriate management software for your hard drive from TackTech (http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287).

5. Boot to the drive software CD/floppy and run the manufacturer's tests on the hard drive. Hopefully it passes. If it doesn't, you will have to replace the hard drive. Still a bargain, but not free.

6. Try to reload the software and see what happens.

BTW, what model Dell is it?

by ehosto

I suspect that is why the pc was free also. the Dell model is a dimension 4600. I will try your suggestions today. I'm back at work where the PC is. I posted my question from home. that's why it took me so long to reply. I neglected to check my work email from home this weekend.

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