I have owned a hp pavilion a545c for three years and it was running smoothly until a week ago. I purchased a new external iomega hd to backup all my data since I was planning to format the pc. It turns out that while I was in the middle of the transfer, the blue screen of death appears ( can't remember the message). I thought that it was one of those common system errors and that with a restart it would all be fixed. Boy was I wrong. I turned it on and it gave me the same error over and over again. I tried fixing it by going to the recovery console and fix the mbr and run fdisk- it didn't work. Even using the xp cd to delete the partition and start over didn't work. Somehow my hd was unknown in the device list.
I was running impatient and decided to format using dban. It wiped my harddrive clean but the same problem still remained. I still can't get xp to recognize my hd while bios does.
Another problem I'm facing is that I can't get the pc to recognize my keyboard while it gets to first screen. I tried with three different keyboard (two sp/2 ones and a brand new usb one).
Specs can be found here:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...n&printable=no