Hard drive not working, partitions wont save

[tguitarplyr182]

i tried to add a hard drive to my computer a day ago, and i changed the cable from the board to the hard drive to support two hard drives. but it turns out that that messed up my comp. so now i put my computer back to its original set up with the 1 cable to the hard drive from the board. and the original hard drive

im using an HP pavilion a510n

whats happening is im trying to install windows XP and its not working at all. i cant even get it to start because it says i cant install it on any of my partitions.

ive tried a few partition editors.

i tried formatting the hard drive. and that got to 100% and before it gave me any other options it restarted.

i tried killdisk, and that freezes without even starting. (unless ESC isnt supposed to work while thats on) should i try leaving it on all day??

the computer keeps restarting over and over. and sometimes i get a BSOD for something about a USBsomethhinsomething.SYS

not sure what is going on here. i looked online to figure out how to do the hard drive install when i started and i did everything it said.

could someone please help me get this computer working again so i can install windows xp?? thankyouu!!!

 

[dfuze]

Are you trying to reinstall windows w/ a retail cd or the HP XP cd?

Also, it sounds like you are using PATA drives (rather than SATA) by the sounds of the dual drive ribbon cable. When you swapped the single for double drive cable, did you put the right drive at the right PATA cable end? Also, did you set one drive to Master and the other to Slave?

 

[tguitarplyr182]

i set one to slave. i assumed the default one was already set to master. it probably wasnt. not sure. but its back to normal now.

and im trying to install off of a retail cd i got online, im not exactly sure where my HP disk is. and i couldnt find one online

hard drive is a seagate barracuda 7200.7 120gb

 

[dfuze]

Whenever I reinstalled XP, I always (from this point on I'm going by memory so please bear w/ me) hit F8 to intall, then would select the option to delete the contents from the drive, it would ask you are you sure, then I would hit "L" to approve it.

Off the top of my head it sounds like you haven't deleted anything off the disk to give it space to put the OS.

Here is a link for step by step. Are you already doing these steps? link

 

[tguitarplyr182]

yah i did that stuff through the cd. i can see the disk on there. but when i make partitions they dont stay, and when i try to install to them it says it cant put windows xp on them

 

[tguitarplyr182]

i have the "ultimate boot cd" and a windows xp cd that i burnt that ive been trying both.

i can get to the hard drives. but when i use the partition tools on the UBC it gives me errors when trying to write the partition info

 

[dfuze]

Is your drive a WD or a Seagate? If so head to their support pages and download a program that will allow you to scan the hard drive (runs off of a bootable CD if I remember), because it's sounding like the HD may be messed up. There may be other programs, but those are the ones that come to mind.

 

[tguitarplyr182]

its a seagate, but i couldnt find the program to download

 

[dfuze]

Try SeaTools for windows

LINK

 

[tguitarplyr182]

trying sea tools right now. running a full scan

 

[tguitarplyr182]

The hard drive passed the test. but when i try to erase it it fails, it wont even start erasing

 

[KillerBee]

Did you try wiping it using another computer?

 

[anticupidon]

when dealing with this kind of issues i use Parted Magic
run the live cd and trigger SMART check error log
if all is ok then parted magic/sistem utilities/wipe
run gparted and see if there is something wrong with partitions
i usually wipe the disk, recreate the partition table and after that i create the partitions

 

[C1]

That sounds good. Once in a blue moon trash gets written to sector 0 that hoses the drive (eg, cant install anything) and the only way to clear it is to wipe the drive. (You actually dont need to wipe the whole dive, but just sector 0.) I suspect mess'n around with partitioning programs could do something like that.