Formatting troubles

[MecaKane]

I'm trying to format my step-brothers' computer for them. I'm not sure what happened to it before, but it won't boot up, the first booting up screen where it checks the ram and all that just keeps comming and going. So I put my windows bootdisk in, but it's pretty crappy and only has an option to format the C drive but that didn't work, because there is no "C" drive, and if I try to install windows it says "Cannot find a place for a swapfile, cannot create swap file". So when that doesn't work it goes into a dos type thing, so I go through all the letters and the only two that work are the CD and DVD drives, F and G.
Does this mean my windows booting CD thing is a piece of crap, or that more seriously there's something phyically wrong with their harddrive?

Oh, I pressed del to go into setup, and I think it can still detect it kind of, because it says what they have for a harddrive as the primary master or whatnot. I dunno if that means anything, though.

[Samuraid]

Sounds like either a dead HDD or a bad IDE channel. (assuming the computer doesn't use SATA) The former would require a new HDD, the latter would likely need a motherboard replacement or an IDE PCI card.

You could try connecting the HDD to the master of the second IDE channel (the one currently supporting the 2 optical drives) and see if you get better results.

[crono_logical]

I'd also check there are actually valid partitions on the disk :p

[Yamaneko]

Put the HDD in another computer with Windows to see if it can read the drive.

[MecaKane]

Samuraid: Do you mean a whole new motherboard or just a replacement IDE chanel? Could I permanently leave the HD connected through one of the other drive's?

clout: How would I do that? Hook it up to a new computer, as Yam said? And for that, if it's not properly formatted would it cause problems from having another windows installed on that drive too?

[Yamaneko]

You'd install it as a slave drive and the primary drive with a good copy of Windows could try to read off the slave drive. You could then format the slave drive within Windows.

[crono_logical]

Or boot a knoppix disc and see what it thinks about the HD as far as readability goes :p If it's not formatted, Window's isn't going to be able to use it or install on to :p Save's messing about with moving hardware around :p Though if it's a proper 2000/XP boot install CD you're using, it should ask to format it for you anyway.

[Samuraid]

Samuraid: Do you mean a whole new motherboard or just a replacement IDE chanel? Could I permanently leave the HD connected through one of the other drive's?

Yeah, I was suggesting that you disconnect one of the working CD/DVD drives and plug the HDD into its place (you may have to set the jumpers correctly on the HDD) and see if it works. If it does, then your first IDE channel may be bad. Since the IDE controller is often integrated into the southbridge on the motherboard, you would probably have to replace the motherboard or purchase an IDE controller PCI card (probably the more cost effective solution).

Oh, and you may want to check the jumpers on the HDDs in their current configuration to make sure they are correctly set.

[MecaKane]

Or boot a knoppix disc and see what it thinks about the HD as far as readability goes :p If it's not formatted, Window's isn't going to be able to use it or install on to :p Save's messing about with moving hardware around :p Though if it's a proper 2000/XP boot install CD you're using, it should ask to format it for you anyway.

What's a knoppix disk? <a href="http://kl-ic.com/knoppix.html">This?</a> How do check a drive for whatevers?
If it doesn't show up should I assume it's a hardware thing, and do those other things?

[Dr Unne]

Knoppix is this: http://www.knoppix.org/ (click the AmeriBritish flag for English) Knoppix is a version of Linux that boots and runs from a CD without needing a hard drive. It will be able to let you detect (and mess around with) your hard drive, no matter if there are Windows partitions, corrupted partitions, no partitions at all, etc. If Knoppix can't see your hard drive, then you very probably have hardware problems.

[Yamaneko]

There are a bunch of other distros that have LiveCDs that run off RAM as well. Like Ubuntu.

[rubah]

I've got some ubuntu live/install cds to give away if you don't want to wait a month or two.