A friend of mine purchased a new computer and gave me his HP Pavillion 8660C to upgrade. I am not a computer tech, just someone who will fix computers as a hobby. The problem he had with his HP was that it was booting slowly. It would take almost 6-10 minutes from turning it on to get to the desktop. I checked all the standard problems like msconfig.sys, etc. all with no result. It continued to take a long while to get to the desktop. I decided to format the hard drive and re-install Win98 SE. The system allowed me to do an FDISK and create a new partition. But, it will not allow me to format the c: drive. It starts the format command, gives me the standard warning, I press yes and it begins the format but hangs at zero percent. I've tried this with both a Win98 startup disk as well as the recovery disks that HP supplies. Nothing works. What am I missing? I've formatted a number of hard drives with no problems. This system will not allow me to format the C: drive at all. I have been advised that this model of the HP has some known motherboard problems. Could this be the reason? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

did you get the recovery disk that came with the HP Pavillion....it has all the windows files and all applications and drivers for the hardware that came with the PC? that might be your basic problem. I have an HP 8670C and am having no problems with my machine booting up. but you have to use the recovery disks that came with the machine to reinstall the Windows software and the hardware drivers for the hardware it came with ,,perhaps to fix your problem....Post back with more info.

Thanks for the response, LJ. Yes, I did try the recovery disks that came with the computer. Still had the same problem. The format command will still not work. My friend did advise that he had compressed his hard drive and I think that may be the problem. I cannot install anything until the hard drive is formatted. Thanks

have you done fdisk/mbr, make sure no other devices like pinter, scanner,.. connected to the tower, also make sure nothing is addd to the original hardware(internally)