my xp computer crashed a couple of months ago and i bought a new hard drive and installed it. the store told me that the hard drive was pre-formated, so i just installed xp operating system on it. it is a 160 gb hard drive. now im having raw data problems on the cd rom and dvd drives. should i have formated the new hard drive before reinstalling the operating system?

Welcome to Geeks2Go, nuthatcher

Windows XP setup is quite capable of both creating and formatting a partition prior to installing XP.

Having said that, it's unusual (very unusual in fact) for a new hard disk to be supplied pre-formatted. If it was, it could very well have been a second-hand one. I've bought 6 new hard disks over 4 years and none of them were partitioned, let alone formatted. That's how new hard disks are usually supplied. Your "new" disk could have been faulty when you bought it. It's almost certainly been used before you got it, unless the store is in the habit of formatting new disks for it's customers? I've never known any store do that, unless they formatted it to 'wipe' the data of a previous owner (as I said, second-hand). But then they should not be selling it claiming it to be 'new'. It could even be argued that the process of formatting it before it's sold renders it 'used' and not new, but that's probably verging on the ridiculous.

In view of it's having been already formatted, I think I would have run a disk-diagnostic utility on it before installing the OS, to satisfy myself that it was in a healthy state. Indeed, you could still do that now. determine what brand it is, then visit the manufacturer's website->customer service->downloads page.
All the main HD maker's offer free disk-checking tools for checking their own disks. They run from a floppy disk or bootable CD-R so you can check the disk even if Windows won't run.

This post has been edited by pip22: Feb 23 2008, 04:57 PM