Tech Support Forum - View Single Post - How to format an inaccessible hard drive?

ginopalomo · 05-02-2008, 01:10 PM

Hi there,

I'm trying to rebuilt a computer at home but it seems to be a problem with the hard drive. This is the HP Pavilion 523n purchased in November 2002 here in the USA. Well, it's a nice computer but one day started to work very very very slow. I decided to use the 8 System Recovery CD's that an HP technician sent me. I want to keep this computer as it was when I opened its box. After the 8 CD's are properly loaded in the machine, the recovery process starts but it stops around 12% to let me know that thousands of files "cannot be open!" (yes, that's the error message I get every time I select the [OK] button when it appears). Nothing happens after that. I contacted a computer repair store here in town, and he said it sounds like the hard drive is damage. But he wants to charge me $45 for a diagnostic, $90 for a new hard drive and $125 for the labor. I simply cannot afford that.

However, I do keep the tower of a Dell in my garage and I thought I could do it myself. I opened the tower of the Dell computer, extracted its hard drive and replace the HP hard drive with this one that I know it works well. So, I insert again the 8 CD's from HP and start the same process. This time everything goes well and farther in this lengthy process... until then a new error appears that reads "cannot partiton hard drive!"

I have being reading all day about how to partition a hard drive before installing the System Recovery CD's, but now it's too late I guess. It seems like I should have run MS-DOS first and the FDISK command on this hard drive before I tried to install it on my HP computer. What can I do now? every time I tun on the computer it takes me back to the first step of the System Recovery process: insert disk 1. Is there a way to access the hard drive to format it now?

05-02-2008, 01:10 PM	#1 (permalink)
ginopalomo Registered User Join Date: May 2008 Posts: 1 OS: Windows XP sp2	How to format an inaccessible hard drive? Hi there, I'm trying to rebuilt a computer at home but it seems to be a problem with the hard drive. This is the HP Pavilion 523n purchased in November 2002 here in the USA. Well, it's a nice computer but one day started to work very very very slow. I decided to use the 8 System Recovery CD's that an HP technician sent me. I want to keep this computer as it was when I opened its box. After the 8 CD's are properly loaded in the machine, the recovery process starts but it stops around 12% to let me know that thousands of files "cannot be open!" (yes, that's the error message I get every time I select the [OK] button when it appears). Nothing happens after that. I contacted a computer repair store here in town, and he said it sounds like the hard drive is damage. But he wants to charge me $45 for a diagnostic, $90 for a new hard drive and $125 for the labor. I simply cannot afford that. However, I do keep the tower of a Dell in my garage and I thought I could do it myself. I opened the tower of the Dell computer, extracted its hard drive and replace the HP hard drive with this one that I know it works well. So, I insert again the 8 CD's from HP and start the same process. This time everything goes well and farther in this lengthy process... until then a new error appears that reads "cannot partiton hard drive!" I have being reading all day about how to partition a hard drive before installing the System Recovery CD's, but now it's too late I guess. It seems like I should have run MS-DOS first and the FDISK command on this hard drive before I tried to install it on my HP computer. What can I do now? every time I tun on the computer it takes me back to the first step of the System Recovery process: insert disk 1. Is there a way to access the hard drive to format it now?