hard drive error??

[Dman]

I just bought a brand new WD caviar 120 gig hard drive. i went to install win2000 until i can get XP and the 2000 disk was bad. something about missing a bunch of images or summat. anyway so it took a crap about halfway through the installation. anyway so i rebooted the computer and now whenever it restarts it says "NTLDR not found"

i tried to use a dos boot disk and format the drive but dos cant locate the drive...

[andrew ramsey]

oops sorry about posting 2 topics i thought i deleted one of them but i guess i cant considering im a guest...

[inuyasha53]

ok there made an account. anyways i made a dos boot disk and i typed fdisk and it says bad command. is there something wrong with my command.com?

[MalikTous]

First, use a CD cleaner on the Win2K CD and a CD drive cleaner disc in your CDROM or CDRW drive.

Next, boot the machine and enter BIOS. You want to set your Boot Order to accept the CDROM, then the HD. (Using a floppy drive for bootup with an NTFS system isn't much use.) Then you can boot from your Win2K CD and try re-installing Win2K with a complete reformatting of the hard drive.

[inuyasha53]

the disk was brand new, someone burned it for me (like i said, just until i get XP), so the actual windows was bad. im not really worried about that tho, im more worried that i cant access anything.

[merlin_2]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q314057&ID=KB;EN-US;q314057

[southernlady]

Just because the hard drive was brand new doesn't mean it can't be bad.

That's WHY they have warranties on them!

I have a brand new 80 gig that will not boot up, that if you plug it into another computer in the slave position, you can NOT see it...and it's LESS than 2 months old. I am waiting for the RMA paperwork now to swap it out for a new one.

And because it failed, I lost several CRITICAL files that I can NOT replace that were too big for a cd, we don't HAVE a DVD burner, and my backup hard drive was full. Liz

[merlin_2]

i have had the same maxtor and western digital...gone..seagate bara...is suppreme...but in the case it a software problem...not...harware.. last reply nice posting...brain comming back to life on 3mille amps..

[inuyasha53]

thanks for the link, but im not upgrading so i doubt it applies to me.

im almost positive there is nothing wrong with the drive.

1 i bought all the peices and put it together at a friends house
2. he gave me a win2k cd that he had just burned to take home and install on the computer
3. i came home and left it to install overnight.
4. i woke up to see an error screen. it said something about a missing image file. it said that i could resume or quit. i clicked resume. it did it again about 3% later. i kept clicking resume and it kecp popping up again.
5. i reboot the computer. it showes everything fine, it sees the drive, but when it checks the DMI pool data it says NTLDR NOT FOUND.
6. i made a dos boot disk and plugged it in. now i cant access the c drive, and fdisk, even when i say to format the a drive, it says its a bad command. i even made sure i typed it right by checking your site.

if i get an XP disk will it be able to save over the bad 2k files?

[inuyasha53]

alright problem solved.... sort of. i got my hands on a western digital boot disk and formatted the drive that way.

thanks for the ideas everyone.