Best Buy's false Diagnostic

[JTKTR]

So I brought in my computer with this issue: got to the windows loading screen, froze, then restarted itself. That was the issue. After I replaced the ram I retried and got the same issue. So, figuring it was something bigger that would be nearly impossible for me to test without buying a lot of crap, I brought it into Best Buy and 3 weeks later, they told me it was the motherboard. For $70, whatever. It wouldve taken me $200 in troubleshooting so I was happy. I went out and bought a new ASUS 790FX board and a new graphics card for good measure (from an 8800GT to a 4780) and after putting it all together, I loaded it up and surprise. Same gd issue. So I'm pissed. Obviously. I mean I went from a 780 board to a 790 board... not that much of a difference. So I did the next thing I could think of. I threw in a Vista CD and did a clean install after formatting the drive. But wait! Windows could not format a partition on disc 0. The error occurred while preparing the partition selected for installation. Error code: 0x80070057. I googled it but came up with nothing.

Someone help me....

 

[ksheets]

Bad hard drive?

http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...-format-partition-disk

Have you tried scanning with UBCD?

 

[JTKTR]

Just tried taking out all the extra crap (TV tuner etc.) and got the same error. I'll run UBCD tonight. On a little card that comes with Vista, it says that if encountering a format error I may need CD's instead of the DVD. Thats gotta be wrong right? At least in this case I dont think it matters.

 

[JTKTR]

Im contemplating just getting a new hard drive and skipping all this crap. Based on other forum posts, that seems to do the trick.

 

[TheStu]

Definitely sounds like a hard drive issue of some kind.

Did you build this system yourself? If yes, then you should get another hard drive and send in your existing one to the manufacturer for replacement.