[MissC]

Hi all,

I am new to this...I did do some searching tho and wasn't able to find info on this. I have a compaq presario laptop running windows xp. I bought it in 2004 but it hasn't been used very much. I recently started using it more and was running it with no virus protection (I know, bad, bad, bad). Of course I got the blue screen of death, it was saying that my hard drive was going bad. Every reboot it got a little worse until it wouldn't load windows at all. I tested the hard drive using one of the F buttons (in setup, before windows loads) and of course it said I had a bad hard drive. What I am wondering is the computer wasn't used much and I don't know how the hard drive could be bad already. Could it be a virus? I am thinking about trying to format and reload everything.....I wanted a little advice first though before really screwing up the computer....any help would be appreciated.

[tbramamam]

That message you are getting when you press the F key during the boot process is from the drive's on-board self testing feature. So it most likely is in fact going (or gone). There are mechanical components to a hard drive as well as the electrical ones, and they can (and do) fail over time. The on-board test doesn't know or care about the operating system or how the drive is formatted, it just looks at the physical status of the drive.

[flavallee]

Boot from the XP CD and format the hard drive and reinstall XP and see if you can get the entire process to complete. If the hard drive is on its last leg, you'll know soon enough.

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