[racenutalways]

This Toshiba A210 is the worse nightmare other then my ex wife I have ever had the pleasure to deal with. After a month of un-proud ownership I had to replace the hard drive, this was 1 1/2 yrs ago. Re-formatting this thing was a nightmare, after 12 attempts, it finally took and installed XP Home, never worked properly but had to live with it or go to Vista. I succeeded to format and install XP through an external DVD drive. Now my laptop decided to add grey hair to my collection and just crapped out.
For a couple of weeks, I tried to diagnos a no boot up problem I was having.
It would freeze at start up. Trying to figure what was going on I took many steps, tested memory, hard drive etc.. As it turns out, it will not boot if there is a USB plugged in on any of the ports. One morning, windows kept crashing, freezing and yelling obscenities at me. I slammed the lid shut, causing more destruction, not only did I break the screen, no biggie, use my TV as monitor anyhow, I had errors telling me files were missing, I took out the hard drive, hooked it up to my other PC, drive is readable, noticed system32 folder was missing 75% of the files. I was able to transfer important files, now I want to re-format. Well, ain't that a load of fun.
It refuses, I've tried XP home, XP PRO and vista. With vista it crashes and says couldn't import files or something like that. XP does a quick format but stays at 0% with the full format. After a quick format, it began to install, hung a couple of times, then those "unable to copy files" came spitting out like mad. I'm trying to boot from my external drive and it does not read the drive, all I get is a BOOTMGR is missing error, ER! You think??

My only guess is the hard drive, although it passed the drive test.

I'm stumped!!!

[Advertisements]

Have you tried to fdisk /mbr first? That may fix the hang on 0 percent of copying files. What kind of drive is it?

[diabillic]

Have you tried to fdisk /mbr first? That may fix the hang on 0 percent of copying files. What kind of drive is it?

[racenutalways]

I did try chkdsk while in the recovery console but not fdisk. It's a Western Digital ATA drive.
Funny thing, I hooked the drive up to my other PC again via ide/ATA cable, but PC wouldn't recognize it this time around, makes me think drive is at fault after all.

[Mr.E]

hmm... i may be way off the ball here but it sounds like perhaps you messed up the boot sector. To my understanding if that very first sector gets screwed up then reguardless of the condition of the rest of the harddrive you can count on a no go. Maybe if you install it as a secondary harddrive and use chkdsk /f /r or similar to have windows attempt to repair all sectors and flag the bad ones then see if you can format it as a secondary drive.

Just out of curiosity... you didnt by chance try to plug a laptop HDD into a desktop did you?

Another thing that would be worth trying if you haven't done this already is fixboot and fixmbr from within recovery console. perhaps those are all you need to get rolling....

[racenutalways]

Thanks for the replies, "fdisk /mbr" spat out "the command is not recognized".
I performed chkdsk /r and at 75% completion, " the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems".

Thankd for your help!!

[racenutalways]

Thanks for your help, new hard drive installed. 320GB HD is only showing 130GB???
ATI graphic card does not detect my TV, I removed the broken screen and hooked up to a
CRT, yuck, I was gonna use my big screen for monitor until I buy a LCD monitor, but....

[diabillic]

You need to use ATA133. Im pretty sure that anything before that does not support over 137GB