Hello,

Well my title pretty much says it. My hard drive wasn't booting, giving me a BOOT DISK FAILURE. After using Norton Ghost to clone the drive onto a new drive I bought from Newegg, it didn't work and gives me the same error. So I was told just to reformat the drive (using a SATA to USB addapter) and try to just do a strait install of Win XP from my HP recovery disk.

The recovery software comes up and says that it can't find the drive. The BIOS can't find the hard drive either.

I have no idea what to do. If anyone here has an idea what I should do, please help me.

Thanks,
Conman5

Welcome to Geeks2Go, conman5.

I don't understand where the "sata to usb adaptor" comes in to the process. Please explain. If you are trying to install from the HP recovery disk on to a SATA drive that's connected via an adaptor to a USB port externally, that will never work because the USB ports are effectively 'dead' until Windows has been installed. That's why the recovery software cannot find the hard disk. The disk must first be fitted internally, in place of the one that's failed. Then try running the recovery software again.

This post has been edited by pip22: Mar 21 2008, 02:20 PM

Im sorry

What I meant was that I did the cloning and reformating to get rid of information via a usb adapter hooked up to my laptop. When I have tried the recovery, it was internally connected.