is it a big yankin deal?

i've been wrestling with an HP laptop since last night. some gawd awful thing happened that had it stuck in a blue screen of death loop, and i got sick of trying to mess with it. i hauled out the recovery cd and did a reinstall.. after many attempts i got it reinstalled. i got up this morning to start reinstalling software and it froze on boot at the windows splashscreen. i let it sit and sit.. it wouldn't go, so i tried a repair and that wouldn't work. i ran checkdisk and it said it had unrecoverable problems or some such nonsense. i tried to format c and reinstall but it won't format. long story short, what i ended up doing was deleting all partitions, creating an 8 meg partition called c, and then a new partition with the remaining space which it named d. and it formatted and is currently installing. is it a big yankin deal what the drive is labelled?

 

ooo.. another question.. can i just go in and re label the drive to c once the install finishes or is that gonna make it crash again?

 

well evidently it was a big deal.. it didn't work.. went thru the entire install and wouldn't boot. i'm at the end of my rope with this thing!! it says the disk is damaged and i don't know how that could happen. it hasn't been moved or bumped or dropped. it hasn't been connected to the internet, so spyware or malware aren't issues.

 

It is possible that the Harddrive is going bad. Can you boot with a Knoppix LiveCD to see if you can do anything with the drive using QTParted? You could try a drive tool such as this http://majorgeeks.com/DiskCheckup_d3464.html

or use Partition Logic: http://majorgeeks.com/Partition_Logic_d4780.html

 

so far i can't get it to do anything.. everytime i try to format the partition it just says the disk may be damaged. i'll try the tools you have suggested later tonight. i just really don't understand what could have happened. the thing is just over a year old, of course just outside the warranty period. i may have to come back to get some help with using the tools. hopefully someone will be here.

Partition logic does not currently support the following:
Formatting non-FAT filesystems

so does this mean it will only format to FAT32? and if so, can i convert to NTFS once i get it formatted? is it even necessary?

 

Necessary ....... Depends on your OS 98 to ME are fat16 and fat32 but 2000 and xp are ntfs

 

it's xp home.. or at least it was til it crashed.. i hope i can get this thing back up. it's not even mine!

 

well no luck with anything. it's still dead. i don't know what else to do with this thing. what's strange is it first gave me problems, big ones, on sunday night. i worked and worked on it to recover it, but to no avail. i gave up on it and formatted and reinstalled win xp home. after a little fight, i got it done. i installed a bit of software and a disc that was included in the installation cd's, a critical update cd. after that installation, i shut it down and went to bed. i got up the next morning to work on getting more of the software reinstalled and it froze on boot. wouldn't go past the windows splash screen where the progress bar at the bottom eventually stopped moving. i shut it down and tried to boot into safe mode and it wouldn't go. it started the loading of the necessaries, and didn't make it past ntkrnl.exe, it said it was missing or corrupt so i copied it from the xp cd and tried again. it made it a little farther and hung on something if i remember correctly called mup or something similar but wouldn't go any farther. so at this point i gave up and was going once more for the reinstall. it wouldn't format, it kept giving me errors that the disk was damaged to select a new partition to install on. so i deleted the partition and tried creating a new one which didn't work either. i then tried creating an 8 or 10 gig partition (c) and another bigger partition (d) and everything seemed to be going fine. it installed ok but then when it went to its first boot it froze on the blue screen before the actual windows logon screen. which brings me to now. i tried to delete the partitions, created a new MBR, did fixboot, and start over but its back to not formatting and saying the disk maybe damaged or not connected. any thoughts on any of this?? i'm at a loss.