My friend has recently recieved a used laptop. Windows is removed from the hardrive. When we reboot the laptop the boot screen comes up and all we see is a blinking cursor on a black screen. I am able to access the bios and can use a windows boot cd to boot to windows, where it asks if you want to format and install windows.
My problem is that when I try to format the harddrive it either freezes at a percentage or it gives an error message, where it says something along the lines of “error cannot format”. I’ve tried both win98 and winxp cd’s and both give the same problem.
… So after having failed using the windows cd’s I burn a boot up disk by using tha “ultimate boot cd” ( http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ ) so I can access dos. After succesfully booting to dos I try “format C:” … and still the same problem. Then I check “fdisk”. It says that the only partition is full at 100%. So I delete that and create a new one and try to format again. Yet, still stuck on the same program.
I’ve searched and haven’t found a solution. is something wrong with the harddrive?. Please someone help me.
P.S. My brother came to me with the exact same problem and symptoms with his laptop a month ago and was not able to solve it.
