Hard Drive failure on bootup

[George]

Hi,

I have a message posted on July 7th at 9 pm looking for a
way to use SCANDISK or CHKDSK on a laptop hard drive with
a bad spot or two ... in the bootup area of Windows XP
Home Edition. Since my system won't boot from the hard
drive or from a CD (neither from the Thinkpad Recovery CD
nor from the Windows XP CD), I think I need to move to
the next level and consider using a floppy to run FDISK
and then reformat my hard drive. (The system IS backed
up ... yay.)

Since there's no FDISK on my XP Pro desktop (from which I
created a StartUp disk), is my only option using a
Windows 98 version of FDISK and FORMAT?

Thanks.

 

[Malke]

Hi,

I have a message posted on July 7th at 9 pm looking for a
way to use SCANDISK or CHKDSK on a laptop hard drive with
a bad spot or two ... in the bootup area of Windows XP
Home Edition. Since my system won't boot from the hard
drive or from a CD (neither from the Thinkpad Recovery CD
nor from the Windows XP CD), I think I need to move to
the next level and consider using a floppy to run FDISK
and then reformat my hard drive. (The system IS backed
up ... yay.)

Since there's no FDISK on my XP Pro desktop (from which I
created a StartUp disk), is my only option using a
Windows 98 version of FDISK and FORMAT?

Frankly, if your system won't boot from the hard drive or the cd drive,
something is seriously wrong with the hardware, probably the
motherboard. Contact IBM Tech Support for help.

Malke

 

[George]

But isn't there any equivalent to the old way of booting
from a floppy, running FDISK, formatting the drive, then
installing Windows???

Thanks, Malke.

 

[Malke]

But isn't there any equivalent to the old way of booting
from a floppy, running FDISK, formatting the drive, then
installing Windows???

Thanks, Malke.

The XP cd is bootable. However, as I said in my first answer to you, if
your computer will not boot from the cd - even when set properly to do
so in the BIOS (hit the IBM Access button when starting the computer) -
and also will not boot from the hard drive, you have hardware problems.
Reinstalling an operating system - software - will not fix hardware
problems.

Malke