Gateway LX6200/Vista/New Hard drive

I have a Gateway LX6200 desktop that came pre-loaded with Vista Home Premium. The hard drive went out recently, so I bought another one. Well, I did not have any recovery disks and could not get to the recovery drive so I called Gateway. They said I needed to order their recovery media, which I did..there are 3 disks, a system disc and two recovery disks. First I set the computer to boot from CD/DVD and put in the system disk, it goes through "windows is loading files", goes to a grey screen where it says "please wait a moment..." then the screen goes to Gateway Recovery Management where you are prompted to select a UI Language, I checked English, it verifies that is your choice and hit ok, then it says How would you like to restore and has two options either Restore System from Factory Default or Exit..I click on the Restore, it gives the warning about erasing all info, click next and gives me "Destination Disk Info..Hard Drive Name: WDC WD10EARX-32NOYBO ATA Device, Partition Label: (nothing is in here) and Partition Size: 931.5 GB...click next get a warning saying this will erase all existing data on Partition : (again, nothing is in here), press Ok to continue. Goes to like a command prompt window that has X:\RyTools\NAPP6.exe across the top then Microsoft DiskPart version 6.0.6001, On computer: MINWINPC. After a few minutes it says Disk 0 is now the selected disk. Partition 1 is now the selected partition. And has a status bar stating 0 percent completed. It will just stay on this screen for a long time then the disk pops out and it says Next Disk, I put in Recovery Disk 1 and it is in there for about a minute then it pops out and says next Disk. I put in Recovery Disk 2 and the Gateway Recovery Management screen comes up saying: Loading Data, please wait while files load. Now copying........0% and Total Progress:......0%. But the percentage never changes and it just stays on this screen, nothing ever happens no matter how long I leave the disk in...I have left it overnight and nothing....
I am so frustrated, have been looking online and came across things like the new hard drive needs to be formatted and partitioned but it only gives instructions on how to do this from the desktop and there is no desktop for me to get to, etc. If I take everything out and let it try to boot from the hard drive I get: a disk read error occurred, press control, alt delete to restart.
I am stuck........

Any help would be appreciated.

 

I also have an LX6200 and actually found this post because I ran into the exact same problem today and was searching for solutions.

I found out that the hard drive needs to be formatted to NTFS prior to running Gateway's recovery software, otherwise it'll get stuck indefinitely at 0%. Once I formatted my hard drive, the recovery process completed without a problem.

There are a number of ways to format the drive (and hopefully other forumgoers here can chime in because I'm sure there are smarter ways than what I'm about to describe). What I ended up doing was pulling out the hard drive and plugging it into another PC to format it from there. This could also be accomplished with a USB hard drive enclosure plugged into another PC.

I believe there are also boot discs you can download and use to format the hard drive without having to remove it; they would allow you to format from a DOS command prompt or another operating system like Ubuntu. I've never done it this way, so again hopefully others can chime in with more specific information on where you can find one.

Anyway, the long and short of it, the drive needs to be formatted to NTFS first, then the recovery disc will work without a problem. Mine is up and running now, with Vista currently setting itself up (to be immediately upgraded to Windows 8 in a few minutes).

Hope this helps, and best of luck to you.

 

Thank you, I was actually just reading about it, I found a program to format the drive but believe it was FAT...I am installing the recovery disks now, it is actually showing %'s now, so hopefully it will work, I did find something that said you could convert the FAT to NTFS later so hopefully it will work.

 

I may have spoken too soon, lol it did move but now stopped at 31% and 18% for a very long time, but maybe just slow

 

Greetings, kimberlyannr and warriorsam, and welcome to MajorGeeks...

Agreed with warriorsam - good advice, indeed...

KimberlyAnn, I think it would be prudent to format the drive to NTFS first instead of potentially complicating matters by formatting to FAT and then converting. If you are able to complete the procedure you're trying, fine - but if you do run into any problems at all, I think it would be best to start from scratch with a format to NTFS.

 

I would love to format it to NTFS but I have absolutely no idea how to do it. Everything I find about formatting seems to need access to some kind of Operating System, I do not know of any way to do this with the Hard Drive already installed with no operating system yet. And I can't do the recovery because the hard drive is not formatted.

 

Good morning...

The methods described by warriorsam are the same ones I'd recommend:

1. Slaving the drive to another working Windows computer (either via IDE/SATA connector or via USB enclosure) and formatting the drive from there...

or

2. Booting to a live environment and using something like GParted or using a Linux distro (such as Mint, Puppy or Ubuntu) to format the drive. Be advised: before downloading one of the Linux distros, do the research to make sure that the particular Linux flavor has the capacity to perform external formatting.

Method #1 is probably the simplest - method #2 adds the advantage of being able to use the Linux capabilities while formatting the drive or in case you need to access the 'net for drivers, etc.

 

What does boot to a live environment mean?

 

Hi...

Sorry - "live environment" is just geekspeak for booting to and running an operating system from an optical drive (CD/DVD) without installing anything.

The GParted and the Linux distros I pointed to must be downloaded and burned to a CD/DVD as an .ISO image in order to make the disk bootable. ImgBurn and InfraRecorder are good free .iso burning programs if you don't already have one, and a couple of tutorials about the process are located here and here.

Once you've burned the image of your choice to a CD/DVD, simply insert the disk into the problem computer's optical drive, reboot the system (making sure the boot order is set for 'CD/DVD first') and the machine should boot to the .ISO image (the "live environment").

 

GParted comes up showing device: /dev/sda (931.51 GB)
Then under Partition it says unallocated..Under File System it says unallocated and under Size it has 931.51. It tells me I need to first create a partition table and when I click on it I get the warning about erasing everything, etc. I click Apply but keep getting the error: input/output error during read on /dev/sda with options to retry cancel or ignore. If i click Retry it just keeps giving me the same error. If I click Ignore it comes up with another error of input/output error during write on /dev/sda..tried keep clicking Ignore but keep getting the same errors and it never finishes.

 

Good morning...

I've never had a problem using GParted to format a drive. Unfortunately I don't have a spare drive available at the moment to walk you through the process (although there should be tutorials available on the 'net). You could also try one of the Linux distros.

Or:

If you could hook the drive up to another Windows system the format process is fairly straightforward.

 

If I were to use something like Mint..does that mean it will be the operating system or will it allow me to just use it to partition/format the hard drive? If it has to be downloaded as an operating system would I still be able to recover Vista and I guess delete Mint?

 

Hi,

In my experience when Gparted has the I/O error on a drive the drive is bad. I know this is supposed to be a new drive but sometimes you just get a bum one.

You could try another software to format the drive and see how it does. If it has problems then I would consider exchanging the HD.

Partition Wizard (50mb) has a bootable disc available at the very bottom of this page so scroll down. http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html

You would burn the ISO the same as you did for gparted.

Then boot from the CD and take a look at the graphs to see if it shows any partitions on that disk. If no partitions then you want to create one and format it.


If there is an existing partition then I think I would still go ahead and delete it so there are no partitions and then go ahead and create one and format it. Just simpler to start fresh.

I'm not dismissing Mint but this is a much smaller download and will give you another look at the drive to help determine if it may be a hardware problem.

 

To answer the question about Mint, it would work much the same as the Gparted CD but will have many more programs. Unlike Gparted it will give an option to Install which you should ignore. You do not need to install to use any program. It will run off the CD and using your RAM fine without installation. I don't think there is any advantage (right now) to downloading Mint because it will also use Gparted as its partitioning agent, so it is not going to provide you with anything additional in terms of partitioning programs.

One other thought if PW doesn't help or shows the disk as being "bad" is to get WD's diagnostic program and run both the short and long tests from one more CD. If it finds a problem with the HD it will either fix it or recommend replacement. I've had very good luck with that program fixing a HD. On a new HD it may be some simple glitch that can be easily corrected. Then you could try Gparted or PW again. Gparted would be my preference. http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=608&sid=2&lang=en

 

Ran the Partition Wizard bootable disk...showed 1 partition that I deleted and then clicked to create a new one..Went through its deal and in the end it came out as: Disk 1 931.51 GB Capacity...931.51 Used, 0 unused , File system Bad Disk, Type Logical Status None. And thats it, no place to format, etc...so does Bad Disk refer to my new Hard drive?

 

Yes it does.

I really think that since Gparted and PW both think the drive is bad it is probably bad. You also had the "Disk read error, press ctrl+alt+del" which is again saying there is something wrong with the way the HD is being read or identified.

The only thing I can think of is to try the WD diagnostic. See what the short and long test results say.

 

One other thought I didn't mention is if this HD shows as Bad in the WD test double check your SATA cable. Make sure the connection is firm at both MB and HD ends. If you have an extra SATA cable or your CDROM is SATA you might try swapping cables with the HD cable just to make sure it isn't a cable causing the HD read/write problems.

 

I re-ran the partition wizard and it looks like it is done:
It shows Disk 1 Capacity 931.51 GB, Used 931.51 GB, Unused 0b, File System NTFS, Type Primary, Status Active...can you think of anything else that would need to be done to it before I try again?

 

It should be ~931.51gb UNUSED. Are you sure it saying that all the space is used?

Something like where drive F: in the lower half of this pic is showing as almost completely empty. http://www.partitionwizard.com/help/partition-wizard-main-window.html

 

Yes I am positive that is what it says...so I deleted it. When creating a new partition it has Partition Label: across the top (which is blank) and gives choices like Create as logical or Primary..not sure what to choose. It does show the file system as NTFS, Drive letter is blank and cluster size is default. For size and location it starts with 931.51 GB, then asks me to choose Unallocated Space Before in MB, Partition size has 953867.22 MB already entered then asks for Unallocated Space after in MB and the last one says Partition Align to: Cylinder or MB. I really only need the one partition for my operating system so what would I choose?

 

I want to thank everyone for their help on this...not only was it a bad drive it was also mislabeled. Once I got another one it worked great.