Bad Harddrive?

[Jdinh04]

i have a old harddrive "IBM 10.0gb @5400rpm" currently like 3-4 years ago
after making a lot of adjustments between upgrading some parts my harddrive seem to not install an OS
first of all the error said NTLDR Missing then i put in a windows 98 and windows98 boot disk and type fdisk at
A/: then it brings me through all these questions and then when i was done i restarted my computer
after DOS it went to a black screen and then said starting....

NO OPERATING SYSTEM

so then i try to install windows xp, but it didn't tell me if wanted to format
in my bios cd rom was the first, then harddrive and then floppy

should i jus get a new hdd or try to fix this one?

 

[Trashman]

Sounds like your hard drive is fine....put xp cd and reboot....follow instructions, during setup, you can format drive to NTFS or Fat32.

 

[Jdinh04]

umm it wont boot up, after dos it brings me to a black screen and then says blah blah and A/:

 

[bond007taz]

if you have a bootable xp cd-rom, it should not worry about the hard drive. If it cant find the NTLDR then, yes, it will give you the middle finger. Since you have a floppy with FDISK, make sure you blow away the partition, reboot and then recreate the partition and then format the hard drive. After the hard drive is formatted, then try and install xp, when you install xp, try and let xp format the drive as well. NTFS is always the best choice for XP...

 

[Jdinh04]

ahh, this is making me mad. i dun want to stress out fixing it so i think buying a new hdd is better
dont ya thinK?

 

[bond007taz]

yup, if you have the money. besides a new one would be a WHOLE LOT faster!

 

[pyrojunkie]

Originally posted by: bond007taz
if you have a bootable xp cd-rom, it should not worry about the hard drive. If it cant find the NTLDR then, yes, it will give you the middle finger. Since you have a floppy with FDISK, make sure you blow away the partition, reboot and then recreate the partition and then format the hard drive. After the hard drive is formatted, then try and install xp, when you install xp, try and let xp format the drive as well. NTFS is always the best choice for XP...

Most of this is just a waste of time. Why would you use fdisk at all if you had a bootable XP cd. Fdisk can only handle FAT32 partitions. Using in on drive that has NTFS will only ruin the data on the drive, thats the reason it wont find the OS.

Why would you use Fdisk to partition it to FAT32, reboot, format FAT32 partition, reboot, then boot with the XP cd, start over by wiping it clean again by making a NTFS partition, then format the NTFS partition???

That is some terrible advice.

The hard drive is fine, you just screwed up the OS a bit. You made things worse by using Fdisk on the NTFS partition. New drive is not needed but it will improve performance greatly.

 

[Jdinh04]

yeah, im getting a new harddrive, do you think anyother parts may have conflict with this problem?

 

[pyrojunkie]

Well since you didn't post any specs, I can't say.