Re-Formatting Problems

G'Day, folks -

I'm trying to wipe clean the hard disk on an old Dell Inspiron 3000 lap top, which is currently running Win98, and to install Win XP. When I try to format the hard drive, I get to 68% completed, then get a message that says NOT READY and the reformat aborts. Can anyone give me advice on cleaning this old machine up? Thanks.

Mark

 

What are you using to reformat with? The XP disc?
If so, get your hands on a copy of Partition magic.
It works off of a floppy and works very quickly.
Partition magic even lets you go from ntfs back to fat32
if you want to.

 

Or better still......see what brand and model hard drive you have in it, and go to the drive manufacturer's website and get their "Hard Drive Utility". Their free. The utility's make a bootable floppy that you can run diagnostics for the drive from, as well as low level format the drive. I've pretty much gotten into the habit of doing that on peoples machines when doing a clean install. It'll completely wipe the drive clean. Even if there's all kinds of partitions, or "boot sector viruses".

 

I'm a big fan of Maxtors utility. I was going to mention that as well. But this is a laptop and I don't imagine that he would know the manufacturer of the
drive without opening up the laptop. It doesn't have an os on it, so he can't try to check from there.
And depending on drive size, that is a very slow fix. Partition magic
is practically instant. Then you can just run the install. An older laptop
probably has a small hd in it, so maybe that's not a bad idea. But in a bigger
drive, I would go with Partition magic. And you can always run scandisk.

 

Does that laptop even meet the minimum spec's for running XP?
I dont think so.
Your probably better off running 98.

To format/wipe HDD, use Fdisk or HDD manufactures free Utility.
My original 98 startup floppy includes Fdisk, If your dont have you can download for free

 

For sure. Or maybe Win 2K

 

Bad sector on hard disk ?

Are you doing the quick format or the full format?

Use a utility like "kill all floppy" that will wipe any paritition away and check the hard disk for any errors.

Sounds like the drive is bad.