Im running windows XP Home Edition on a Time Computer laptop which is about 10 months old and has an AMD Athlon 1800 processor and 384 Ram.. It was working great untill a couple of months ago when the screen froze and forced me into shutting it down manually. After rebooting I got the message "Hard Disk Boot Sector Invalid". There isn't any important files on my pc so I don't mind if formatting is the only option but even that is giving me problems.. When I run the recovery floppy disk I get the message "Due To partition Creation Failure MBR has been wiped"... It recognises the CD Rom as the X: Drive and when I try to restore from the recovery CD , it says "0 partitions defined" and also says that fixed disk 1 is disk write protected.. So then I went to F-Disk and created a primary DOS partition.. It said it was succesfully created so then I tried the recovery disks again but still get the message saying "0 partitions defined".. Is it possible for my hard drive to be disk write protected ? and if so , how do I return it to normal.. So then I decided to try and Install Windows 98 from a floppy disk and CD rom.. It says "Windows 98 has detected C Drive does not have a valid FAT or FAT 32 partition".. Is there any reason why it isn't acknowledging the partition on the hard Drive ? Then I tried to boot from a CD of Windows 95 but got this message "Setup found a compressed volume or a disk-cache utility on your computer. Quit setup and check your compressed volume with your disk compression software , or remove the disk cache utility and run setup again".. This has left me baffled so then I decided to Format C Drive.. When I type in "format C" I get the message "Required Parameter Missing".. Any help on this or how to format my drive will be appreciated..

You can try format c: /u,but I recommend a low level format,then run fdisk and format the drive b4 loading '98 or after the low level format just reinstall XP.Goodluck

boot with the win98 boot disk. a:\fdisk see if the drive appears. when asked , say yes to lba at the opening. remove, recreate partitions there. then reboot, back to a: type in a:\format c:/s thats the proper command to format after format, with the win98 disk in reboot , choose cd-rom support, then switch to the cd-rom drive letter , which is usually e: during setup. e:\setup

You can try running chkdsk /r /f from a command prompt in windows XP. You will have to schedule the chkdsk to run the next time you restart the computer. Also try restoring the Master Boot Record. fdisk /mbr

Thanks Guys. I'll give those suggestions a try and will write back with the results.

Im unable to create a partition on the hard drive even though it says it has been created succesfully.. I get the message "Write Protect Error writing Fixed Disk" when I exit f-disk.. When I try my recovery disk It gives the message "Unable to find ghost.exe". which might be a reference to Norton Ghost which was installed on the pc.. I've tried doing the format commands as suggested but I either get a message saying "Format not supported" or "Parameter format not correct - c".. I've also tried a surface scandisk for C but it takes about 5 seconds and says Scandisk is complete.. I think there must be a virus on my hard drive , or the write protect thing is preventing me from creating a partition. I'd be gratefull for any other suggestions.. It's still under warranty so maybe I can get if fixed for free..

I tried the chkdsk /r /f command but got a message saying I should try scandisk instead.. Scandisk didn't work properly and when I tried fdisk /mbr I got the write protect error message again..