Format command no good for 40gig harddisk?

Hi guys

Trying to fix an XP computer of a neighbour – virus (MSN Messenger Live) seems to have made any boot / start up option impossible.

Size of harddisk is 40gig

I resort to what I know; grab some old floppies: fdisk + format.
Formatting starts but stops at 9% to “recover allocation units”. Process takes forever, then formatting resumes for another 20%, the “recovers allocation units” again. The whole shit takes 5 hours.

Installation of Win2000 goes problem-free. Today neighbour wants XP on his machine; has CD.

I think okay, (Dos) FORMAT shouldn’t be a problem today; maybe the virus whacked the FAT yesterday. Same story.

Question; has this something to do with the size of the harddisk?
Can FORMAT (Dos) command no longer be used on XP OS’s with larger harddisks, or is this another problem?

Any info would be very much appreciated. I did look in the FAQ but only saw references to partition programs.

Thx much, folks!

 

Thx Tim. I didn't have the XP cd (or anything at the time).

I ended up getting the thing running, even finding the sound driver; everything worked. Now the guy's installed MSN Messenger life again, and I'm faced with the same problem. (But now i do have the XP CD).

The machine won't boot on the CD however, and I'm thinking that the FAT or a hard drive sector/partition is whacked again, making the system inaccessible. Is this a residential virus possibly that gets activated by Live Messenger, for instance? The man 'accepted' a virus program thru it before his machine went down.

*It was really an answer to the cause for that weird 'restoring of allocation units' I was looking for, when the computer started formatting* (a process that lasted 5 hours). I've never seen this in 20 years of ****ing around with computers.

And now I'm faced with the same problem again.

Any ideas what could be going on there? I'm reasonably fit with general knowledge but not confident with BIOS flushing/replacement. I guess I could try a BIOS upgrade - would this dispose of potential residential virusses.

(Of course I checked the boot sector for shit but everything came up clean).

I'd really appreciate help, or else I'll be sitting in this guy's house for hours every other day. <sigh>