Formatting Problem

[john2512_00]

Hi all,

My Friends PC has an issue, where when formatting his only hard disk to install windows XP on full Format of NTFS it always freezes at 39%, On quick NTFS format it runs fine, but once windows has installed he quickly starts to rack up erors when running different programs etc

any idea what could be behind this?

I assuming it was a bad sector on the hard disk, but im told XP etc does not need scandisk/chkdsk as it will automatically bypass any dmaged locations.

thanks for anyadvice
J

 

[PC eye]

Worn read/write heads on a drive will caise Windows to see a long list of problems while there may no bad sectors on the platters. Once a drive starts seeing problems you can read and copy from it while writing to it like installing Windows following partitioning, formatting or reformatting becomes a head ache. With Windows finally running problems will still persist due to a drive going doa sooner or later.

Besides running the disk scanning tool you could be looking at something besides the drive there however like bad memory. With one or more dimms installed even one bad will cause numerous problems. On an older system dust and dirt inside the optical drive would cause a bad install of Windows itself explaining problems there too.