Formatting with problems

How are your drives connected to the motherboard of your pc ?
Are they through an IDE cable or Sata?

If the drives are connected by the first interface type, its likely that you will find you have not moved the jumper on the back of your HD to Master device, and your DVD Reader/Writer to Slave device.

If both are set to master, or slave this will happen when both devices are connected using the same IDE cable.

So check the HD is jumped on the back to Master, and DVD jumper is set to slave.
Then give it a try.

its more that i want to format my hard drive without being able to use a disc to just install over the top and what would be the best way to do this

Sata hdd. IDE dvd drive. I had tried what you had said. And the problem didnt happen after a build or shuffle. It happened just randomly one day.

I have read some things about w7 editing the registry for dvd drives to confuse the upper and lower limits however i have changed these. deleted them. Uninstalled the drive and let the OS pick them up. Still to no avail.

download The Ultimate Boot CD: http://100-downloads.com/search.php?q=ubcd, burn to a disk, boot from this disk, select HDD Tools and wipe, open wipe, MAKE SURE you select the drive you want to Wipe, hit F10, follow the directions, go get some coffee, and come ack in half hour and see how it's goin, this will take a while, especially if the drive is big
After it is done remove the disk, put your Windows disk in and reboot, install

without a disk drive remember. like i said the disk is present, it just wont read anything and gives me an error. I would just boot straight to windows disk if i could  

I have tried booting to the disk drive but it just wont.

for example if you put in a bootable cd
you get the "press any key to continue" black screen after the mobo splash screen.
even with a windows disk in mine just goes splash screen >> "starting windows"

i have tried this with a few drives and nothing.

would booting from a different HDD and making mine a slave and formatting from within this be the best possible move?

can you boot from a USB device, if so put the contents of UBCD on a USB stick, and boot the computer, make sure in BIOS you have boot from USD device enabled, let me know how it goes
sounds like your CD/DVD has died

Sorry, copy the ISO to the USB device
sorry having to many distractions, use UltraISO(it's free) to burn the ISO to the USB device, make sure you select make the device bootable, select the drive and birn, then it will boot from the USB device

Yeah at first i thought it might have died however i replaced with another spare that i knew was working as i was ripping with it the day before. and the same thing happened. It gives me an APPLICATION NOT FOUND <disk drive number>. the drive itself will open and close and the device manager shows no problems with it

I think im going to try to boot a different master HDD then run mine as a slave and format through this.

if not i will try to make a bootable USB with an iso mounter. got the one i can use anyway set up so its just making the usb a bootable device which is easy.

there is a sticky in this section about using a USB drive to install windows, you might want to look it over

Hello possiblyreefer,

Have you tried installing Windows 7 with USB Flash Drive? I use USB flash drives all the time for OS install it works perfectly - lot faster and no DVDs to get scratched and damaged! :-)
You can download the USB tool for free and copy your Windows 7 ISO to the USB. Complete instructions can be found here:
http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool
Thanks,
John M
Microsoft Windows Client Team

must be a echo

What happens when you boot from the Windows 7 DVD? You can always format your drive through the Windows 7 DVD and then perform a custom installation.

Does this not work. If not, what error message do you see?

Jessica
Microsoft Windows Client Team

yeah i thought this aswell.
Firstly i set my boot prio to obviously take dvd drive 1st followed by hdd.

secondly i entered the boot prompt screen asking what i wanted to boot to out of a given list. Chose the dvd drive and it just went black then just passed it and booted windows as normal from my hdd.
as i have said before i have replicated this with a optical drive that i know is 100% working. And windows even picks up the disk drive and all. Not really sure what more to try apart from a usb format

maybe the IDE controller went south and forgot to come home

Thats a good point actually. Although i think im just going to get a new hard drive   saves all this crap and my current one is nearly full. Fed up with having to rely on steam games for my entertainment as i cant install anything else  

special thanks to number13 for keeping with me on it after a week and the windows team

we like helping, sharing knowledge, it's fun

Im genereally quite good at hardware problems but this one had me stumped   i thought that i can just make a get around clause by removing the problems  . But this means a thread on the caviar black vs deskstar vs spinpoint  

my DVD burner quit working, could burn CD's, but no DVD's, tried all kinds of software, but the idea that the drive died escaped me, until someone pointed it out, it's always the simple things
the WD blackcomes with a 5 year warranty, the deathstar(pun intended) do seem to have some issues with reliability, the spinpoint is a good drive

I got "access denied" for the C:\ object soon after I turned off the HOMEGROUP.

Windows Explorer still showed most everything in both the left and right panes, but attempts to expand anything in either pane got the "access denied" pop-up. Also, I could not even create a new folder on the desktop ("access denied").

Properties for C:\ worked, so I checked permissions. No user had permission to use C:\ (!)

Checking ownership showed "Administrators." I changed it to my userid. Then I could give permissions to my userid (and to Administrators just in case).

No more "access denied" pop-ups.  

= = = = = = = = = = = = more added ...
It is possible, even probable, that the issue arises only if you previously made C:\ a shared object. You might have done this, for example, when your computer is part of a secured home network and you trust everyone in the house. lol

You can reproduce the issue at will as follows:

Control Panel-->HomeGroup-->Leave the HomeGroup-->confirmation/acknowledgment dialog


Permissions for C:\ are immediately gone.  

You can get them back manually by respecifying ownership with the kludgy Properties-->Security-->Advanced-->et cetera dialog implied earlier above. They come back at once (no restart required).