Corrupted hard drive?

[jon]

I tried to boot my pc the other day but was unable to do
so due to missing system 32 file error showing.I ran the
fdisk/mbr command to clear the boot record which i now
know was a mistake. Since then windows Xp will not
install from the cd as it starts showing multiple errors
when copying files to the hard drive when installation
reaches around 50%?.
The only was to install xp was to us a windows 98 boot
disk and format the hard drive using the ms dos commands
and then create a fat32 partition.After this inserting
the xp disk and changing to ntfs worked and xp installed
ok with no file copying errors.
The only problem is that i selected use all available
space to create partition which is correct but when
partition was created the hard drive still showed 500 mb
of unpartitioned space which does not normally happen.
Is there and was to completely clear the hard drive as
there seems to be the 500mb space that cannot be
partitioned and xp won't do a normal install and format
from the cd as above. I also cannot understand why the
hard drive came up with missing system 32 files when
trying to boot in the first place when it was running
great when i turned it off with the latest Norton
internet security defenitions installed?

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Jon.

Rather than try to retrace your steps and correct any missteps, why not just
take a shortcut?

Set your computer to boot from CD. Put your WinXP CD-ROM in the drive and
reboot. In the very beginning, when Setup asks if you want to repartition
and/or reformat your HD, tell it Yes. And tell it to use NTFS.

xp won't do a normal install and format
from the cd as above.

When you boot from the CD, exactly what happens, step-by-step? What error
messages do you see?

Sometimes the whole HD cannot be included in the single partition for some
reason. Some HD manufacturers use part of the HD for overhead or
housekeeping. Some OEMs (Dell, HP, Gateway?) reserve part of the HD for
their own use. Sometimes it's just drive geometry: the number of
cylinders, platters and heads don't allow for the partition to use every
last bit on the HD. Since you didn't tell us anything about either your
computer or your HD, we can't even guess at the explanation in your case.
We don't even know if the HD is 1 GB or 200 GB, or if it is IDE or SCSI or
SATA. :>(

RC

 

[Guest]

-----Original Message-----
I tried to boot my pc the other day but was unable to do
so due to missing system 32 file error showing.I ran the
fdisk/mbr command to clear the boot record which i now
know was a mistake. Since then windows Xp will not
install from the cd as it starts showing multiple errors
when copying files to the hard drive when installation
reaches around 50%?.
The only was to install xp was to us a windows 98 boot
disk and format the hard drive using the ms dos commands
and then create a fat32 partition.After this inserting
the xp disk and changing to ntfs worked and xp installed
ok with no file copying errors.
The only problem is that i selected use all available
space to create partition which is correct but when
partition was created the hard drive still showed 500 mb
of unpartitioned space which does not normally happen.
Is there and was to completely clear the hard drive as
there seems to be the 500mb space that cannot be
partitioned and xp won't do a normal install and format
from the cd as above. I also cannot understand why the
hard drive came up with missing system 32 files when
trying to boot in the first place when it was running
great when i turned it off with the latest Norton
internet security defenitions installed?

.Sorted it out by going into disk management where the

unpartitioned space was showing up as a master boot
record so i just deleted the partition and reformatted
the 500 mb using ntfs.No windows insalled finefrom the
xp cdwith no errors nan no unpartitioned space.