Unable to format my hard disk.. help

For some reason, when I tried to format my hard disk, it says "Windows was able to format this hard disK" along this line. This happened midway through formatting and now the disk is unusable.

What's causing this?

Prior to the first format attempt, the PC feels extremely slow (taking up to 30 min just to load the windows). I thought by formatting it will fix the problem, but now it seems the problem is even more worse. When I try to turn on the PC with a bootable disk, the PC straight away hang.

Any ideas?

 

Yes, that sounds quite likely. I used to buy old computers from our local tip, as a sort of challenge to see if I could get them working. Most of the time I was lucky and they worked fine with a few alterations / additions here and there. But there was one I never did get to load an operating system. It was quite old (like windows 95 spec) and it would not properly recognise a hard drive most of the time. I had it under my desk for 4 months, and when I was bored, I'd have a go at getting it going. One time, it actually went throught the whole formatting process (formatting using a windlws 98 start up floppy), and I triumphantly went to install XP. It got half way through doing this, and then the screen went black, displaying the message "No fixed disks present !".
I gave up on it eventualy, and used it for spares. But I never did find out exactly what was wrong with it. I tried different (known good) hard drives, different ram, different chips, cmos batteries etc, I changed ribbon cables in case one was damaged, I changed the jumper settings on the board, I reset the bios settings to default, all to no avail.

What were you using to format it ? And is the bios set to boot first off the CD or floppy ? If not, maybe it's trying to load the now unbootable operating system you got part way through formatting.

If you can get it to boot from a windows 98 or ME start up disc, you could use the FDISK command, delete the partition, then restart it with a windows installation CD and see if it will format without hanging.