Recovery not working - Toshiba laptop

[Paramesh]

Hi,
My Toshiba laptop hard disk crashed a few weeks ago, but I was able to
recover most of my documents using Bart's PE CD. Now when I am trying
to re-install all the programs using the Recovery CD supplied by
Toshiba it is not working. When it starts, after the initial messages,
a mesage comes sayinmg "Formatting .. 0%". Then it changes to something
like "Trying to recover allocation unit 897". The number 897 slowly
increases to 914, then the screen suddenly goes blank, and stays like
that for atleast 2 hours - I don't know whether it will ever come out
of it.
After this happened once I turned off the laptop and started with
Bart's PE CD and formatted the disk - it took a long time to format - I
left it running over night, wasn't finished when I went to office in
the morning, but was finished when I returned in the evening. After
formatting it reported 55.8 GB free (it is a 60 GB disk). I tried the
recovery after that, but still the same behavior. I called Toshiba
support, and they said that it could be hardware failure.

Is theer anything else I can try before I take it to one of their
repair centers and order a new disk?

Thanks
Paramesh Kumar

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

Did you try booting direct from the Toshiba recovery disk and installing
using that method... even if it means a completely clean install?

If it still doesn't work, then I'd take it to a Toshiba Service Center.

 

[Paramesh]

I bought a new 60GB hard disk, replaced my old hard disk with this, and
tried the recovery CD - it still doesn't work. Could this be because of
some size limitation for FAT32? The recovery CD first loads Windows 98;
so can it format the whole disk? Should I partion the disk before doing
teh recovery?