Needed to format, might have messed up my drive

[El Gringo]

I was given a Toshiba laptop to fix which was highly b0rked, various things I thought might be solved my malware and virus scans, but several problems remained.
So I decided to format, and seeing as the XP installation had never been defragged or reinstalled I thought it might be good.

1st problem was upon sticking the XP cd in the drive I was told that I couldn't install the CD's version of XP since the laptop's version was newer. Bum.

So apart from partitioning the drive, I determined that I was in need of a bootable partition prog, and after a short search I settled, probably unwisely, on DBAN.

I wrote it to DVD (sob, only damn media I had to hand, 2mb on a 4Gb disk ) and booted it up. I then discovered it planned to spend the next three days formatting my hard disk, something my schedule did not permit. So I stopped it after 30 mins.

MY logic was that all I needed to do was bork the OS up enough for it to accept me booting from my XP CD and allowing me to format and install over the mess left on my HD.

So I stick the XP CD in and it LOOKS like it's booting, until I get a BSOD on a sys file ,which I can't remember right now.

CAn anyone point me towards a path which might be any less dense than mine? Much appreciated


In other news, I've managed to magically transform my 1Tb external HD into a 498Gb one. Only has one partition. I think I should concentrate more on flower arranging

 

[Coxyis]

Sounds like you were trying to upgrade/install from within windows to me...?

Try inserting your XP disk, restarting and hitting any key to boot from disk. Follow the on screen instructions from there and format the current partition.

Is it a full xp install disk, or something bundled with the laptop?

 

[Schizo]

i had the same problem with a laptop.

i found out that the hard drive had 2 partitions on it and had to format the whole drive and make it into one partition.

i could only do this on my pc with the hard drive in my machine.

after that everything went fine.

 

[El Gringo]

Sounds like you were trying to upgrade/install from within windows to me...?

Try inserting your XP disk, restarting and hitting any key to boot from disk. Follow the on screen instructions from there and format the current partition.

Is it a full xp install disk, or something bundled with the laptop?

I've tried, I get a BSOD every time. It's an XP CD of mine which I know works, this is all rather annoying.

Are teher any bootable formatting progs out there which don't take three days? Any other ideas (apart from sticking the HD in my tower, which is 550 miles away )

 

[Coxyis]

Have you tried using a different disk? I know you say you're sure it's working, but I would try something else just to see how it reacted.

Give W7 a whirl on it? Or try a linux (I know wrong forum) install that you can download and burn to a disc?