Trying to reformat an old Laptop ran into a problem never had before

[newjacksm]

As soon as it was done reformataing my old Compaq Evo N100C I got this Error



Setup was unable to format the partition. The disk may be damaged. Make
sure the drive is switched on and properly connected to your computer. If
the disk is a SCSI disk, make sure your SCSI devices are properly terminated.
Consult your computer manual or SCSI adapter documentation for more
information.

I then could not even boot up into the operating system. It gave me a general error about going into an operating system.

I am pretty sure my HDD is fine as I was on it 30 min before I was reformatting it.

Any ideas? The bios really sucks on this computer...

 

[berry120]

Well the first port of call would be to check if the hard drive really is OK - I'd recommend grabbing Hiren's boot CD or UBCD and running some of the tools on there to check the disk. It's possible it was going bad without you knowing it!

 

[newjacksm]

can i check the HDD with hiren with out going into Windows? Because now it wont let me going into the operating system

Edit.

It seems my HDD is alive Hiren's boot CD is reading it. It seems as if that the reason why it isnt booting into an operating system is because I got that error when it was 100% done formatting and didnt go threw to the next step. My HDD is an IDE as well.

I got it working