HD Problem That Has Me Stumped...

[FluxCapacitor]

I've been trying to reformat a customer's hard drive all day and came across a problem. He used to have Windows 2000, but that was acting very odd. He never set a password but said it made its own password and locked him out. Anyway he decided to go with the XP Pro Upgrade. So I do the reformat, and it copies the XP files, but when it starts to load the rest of the setup, I just get this:

Couldn't open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)
NTLDR: Couldn't open drive multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)

I thought maybe the upgrade CD didnt copy correctly so I used a full version CD we had...same issue. I then used our Maxtor Diagnostic CD to reformat the drive, and THEN went into XP setup. Same problem. I'm rather out of solutions and need to have this fixed soon. BTW I ran every test in the Maxtor diag disk and it passed every one. I also checked BIOS and the HD is the first boot device. Any help is VERY MUCH appreciated.

 

[Trizoy]

fdisk the partition, and create a new one... then it will all be new.

 

[FluxCapacitor]

Heh I feel dumb...could someone refresh my memory on the process to fdisk a drive?

 

[Dngrsone]

Boot up the XP CD, choose Partition and go at it.

 

[FluxCapacitor]

I've done that. I boto to XP disk and delete the previous partition, and them create a new one. It formats, and copies the installation files but when it starts to load the actual setup menus, it craps out and give that message I posted in the original post. It does this with the upgrade XP Pro and a full version.

 

[Dngrsone]

Then you may have an actual problem with the drive. Download and burn yourself the Ultimate Boot CD and run diagnostics on the drives. Run memtest86+ on the memory while you're at it.