Reinstalling Windows Hardrive Problem

[baren10]

My PC had been having some problems, so I decided to totally reinstall Windows XP and start afresh. The OS cd was working fine, but then my computer shut off, probably because my battery ran out of battery. When I tried to start again, it was working fine, but when I came to the menu that asked if I wanted to install windows (the first menu, after it runs some scans) and I hit enter, a screen popped up saying that there is no hard drive, and I had to restart. Even my Bios said that there is no hard drive. However, sometimes it does detect the hard drive, and everything works fine, until I start formatting the drive, and when it's at about 50%, a blue screen shows up that says that a problem has occured, something to do with partmgr.sys, and I am forced to shut down. This has happened about three times, but otherwise it doesn't detect my hard drive. So now i'm left with a computer that doesn't have any OS on it, and it rarely detects my hard drive. Any ideas?

[ronallandottk]

I'm not really keen on assuming that it's a hardware fault, since hardware faults aren't really triggered by loss of power. Try resetting your BIOS. Enter your PC's BIOS, load the setup defaults, save and reboot. Enter the BIOS again, and check if your hard disk is properly detected.

If it still isn't being detected properly or reliably, it's possible there was a fault on the disk generated while it was being written to during the initial attempt at reinstallation. You may need to low-level format the hard drive, which essentially "zeroes-out" the disk, wiping it clean.

Some PCs have an option in BIOS for low-level formatting the drive. If not, Most hard drive manufacturers such as Seagate or Western Digital offer such a utility for download on their websites, usually in the form of a disk image which you burn to CD for your target PC to boot from.

After the low-level format, try reinstalling Windows again.