Hi everyone, I have a Sony Vaio PVC RX650 P4 512mb ram that a friend of mine brought in for me to fix. Originally it had XP Home installed that came with the system but for some reason he wanted to have XP Pro on it instead and went ahead and bought it and installed it on top of XP Home while in Windows. Everything went well until have way thru the installation of Pro, it hanged. He decided to reboot the machine and since then it wont boot at all. Displays a error message saying, "Error loading". It won't even display the windows start up screen at all. Seeing that the system wont boot at all. I decided to boot from my Knoppix STD cd to see if I can at least view the contents of the hard drive. No luck. It would not even mount the drive saying it did not understand the file system. I'ved always used knoppix to recover data from an unbootable system and this is the first time I was unable too. At this point I went ahead and used the recovery disks that came with the system and just as they started to do their magic it came up with a message saying, unable to access hard disk. At that point, I decided to boot from a 98 boot disk, delete the NTFS partition using delpart.exe "it's a neat program" and then using fdisk to create the partition again. That went well up until it was time to format the partition from dos and then it started to display message, "trying allocating 503,500 and then same message but 104,503" Took a long time to format. Finally it said formatting failed. What do you all make of this? Is it possible that Windows killed the hard disk? Everyones opinion are greatly appriciated... thanks.. James

laptop hard drives fail more often than desktop pcs in my experience so it is certainly a possibility. if its still under warranty get it checked out. if its not try swapping it with another drive.

Use a the proprietary hardrive's diagnostic tool to test it for failure. If it passes the test try a low level format as in (write zeroes) before reformating it.If it fails doing that the drive is hosed.

Hi guys, I'll try your suggestion Sabertooth, I went to Seagates's website and downloaded their diagnostic tools and ill try to do the low level format as you suggest. I did fail to mention that this is a desktop computer. Not a laptop. It has a Seagate hard drive and I think they are good hard drives. So I hope it's nothing serious and there is something that I can work with. Do you think its a good I deal to use a program called Eraser? It does a DOD wipe, "department of defense" type of wipe on the hard drive. Would that help any? thanks.. James

Writing zeroes resets the binary to zeroes so you do not really need to "DOD wipe" the drive.