HDD trouble

[medicineman]

hey fellas-

my main hdd has died but i have another hdd that i have been using for games etc. the hdd is a seagate 40 gig that a friend gave to me that was in his packard. my problem is (i'm guessing here) maybe a partition that is holding the hp bundled software on this hdd and is preventing me from installing the os. i remember him telling me that there was bundled software on it because his pc had no disks with it. i'm unable to find out the model hp that this hdd came with because he got killed in a wreck about a month ago..........

anyway, when i try to install winxp pro it goes all of the way through the install, gets to the part to where the pc restarts, and when it does restart it begins the install process all over again . ive changed the boot sequence to boot from the hdd first (so when it restarts it tries the hdd first) but it starts up the install process all over again. my system is:

2.4 celeron
QDI P2PE/800 pro mobo
256 ddr
128 mb ddr 9100 vid card

i did find this remark in my paperwork that came with the mobo........

" to support LBA or Large mode of HDD'S, there must be some softwares involved which are located in Award HDD Service Routine(INT13h). it may fail to access a HDD with LBA(Large) mode selected if you are running under an Operating System which replaces the whole INT13h"

in the bios it does set it to LBA mode when "auto detect" is chosen for HDD selection. i'm not really sure what the above is saying or what the solution might be though. ive done a few searches and i found a thread that said you could use the utility "Delpart" to destroy the hp partition that holds the bundled info. i thought i burned it to a disk but when i insert the disk and boot the pc a bunch of dos stuff comes up saying its dr. dos......

surely there is a way to salvage this hdd and be able to use it but i cant figure it out and really dont have the cash to spend for a new hdd at the moment. if anyone could help i'd certainly appreciate it. im on my in-laws pc right now and ill check back in a bit.

thanks-
med

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:3250, old post ID:26428