Formating my laptop.. It doesn't seem to be working quite right..

[t3hpython]

So I've been having alot of problems with my laptop recently, and finally got fed up with it and decided to wipe the hard drive and start fresh.

I booted from the Vista reinstall CD that came with it, got in to the command prompt, and did a good old fashioned "format c:"

I know formatting takes a long time, but it's been sitting at 91% for about 4 or 5 hours now..

Any idea why it's doing this? What I can do to fix it?

 

[t3hpython]

Windows tells me it can't format because it's the same HDD that Windows is installed on.

 

[ainarssems]

format when in vista setup booted from cd

 

[t3hpython]

Yeah that's what I tried to do. Like I said, it got to 92% and then stopped. I'm gonna dig out my old XP CD and see if i can't format it from that one.

 

[t3hpython]

Ok.. So I booted from the XP CD... I get this error message:


"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed on your computer."

I'm starting to hate this laptop.

 

[ainarssems]

That's because xp disc did not have sata drivers. Google for nlite na duse it to integrate SP3 and SATA drivers in your xp disc.

For vista format I am just wondering why did you use format c: instead of gui formating

 

[t3hpython]

Thanks, I'll google that.

The reason I'm not GUI formatting is the reason I'm wiping it to begin with. It keeps bluescreening on me and won't last long enough for me to get to the GUI. Until I reinstall the OS, that's not really an option. When I try to do anything else from the Vista boot disk aside from install Vista, it claims it "can't automatically fix" the errors.