Hard dive errors, please help!!

[DPtheGod]

Hey everyone!

I'm pulling my hair out over this... My friend asked me to reformat his computer for him, and when I tried, it said Windows failed to format the drive and gave the error code 0x80070057. I have never seen that before, but now the partition was deleted and I can't install Windows (same error code). Now I'm freaking out, because I don't want to resposible for this. Anyone know of what could be causing this, or what I can do to get it to format?

The OS disc is Vista 64-bit Home Edition.

Thanks everyone!

 

[Celegorm]

Why did he want the reformat? Typically when I see this it's because the hard drive was bad/failing already.

If you have absolutely no need of any data on the drive you can try a low-level format if the manufacturer of the drive provides the tools. That'll either make this work perfectly for you, or fail miserably and confirm a bad drive. But first I'd try getting diagnostic software for the hard drive and running that.