*HELP* erased hardrive!!

[x-glow]

Ok, So a couple of days ago, I was trying to install XP but it could not find my hardrive, so I thought right I will install my vista again and that way my laptop will be faster, so I click format, and then it said error:000 a problem eccured but it has now errased all my hardrive!!! I have no OS! Everytime I try and install vista then it goes error cant fomart hardrive and this time I didnt even click format!!Im willing to pay £30 via mail to a person who can give me a tut on how to fix this!!


EDIT: MY MUM N DAD DONT KNOW ABOUT THIS I DONT WANT THEM TO! IM NOT WANTING TO TAKE MY LAPTOP TO TECH-GUYS OR WHATEVA!

[AgnesIO]

How big is your HD and how old is it?

[x-glow]

Hard drvie is 250GB and like a year and a half old laptop.


Anyone else help?

[AgnesIO]

Hard drvie is 250GB and like a year and a half old laptop.

Oh its a laptop :L

I was thinking you just buy another one for that price :P

never worked on laptops though.

[x-glow]

Nah I wouldnt buy another 1 mainly becuase my mum and dad dont know!!

[Calvin]

can you restore to a system restore point maybe? lol

[Joe!]

Are you using a vista installation disc or trying to use a recovery partition?

[Recursion]

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ download and burn to a disk, then boot your laptop from it and format the hard drive to NTFS in there, then shut it down, boot and install Windows XP or Vista.

@ Sizzling, how would he do that without an OS to even restore with? :/

[x-glow]

recursion, How do I format it to NTFS? Imnot good with computers, and if this works btw, I will send you £50 via post.


EDIT: DO I BURN THE FILES TO THE CD?

[Recursion]

You download an ISO file of GParted, then use something like IMGBurn to burn it to a CD, put the CD in your laptop and it should boot from it, when you have managed to get into the interface click on your HDD and click format, then pick NTFS and click Format, it'll do the rest, then all you have to do is shutdown, remove the GParted disk and shove the Vista or XP disk in.

[Chippiewill]

Bah, incorrect. Vista wouldn't be stopped by a bad partition. You need something a little bit stronger...

You need:


http://www.grc.com/image/sr6.gif
SpinRite now brings its legendary data recovery and drive maintenance magic to the latest file systems, operating systems, and hard drives. It runs MUCH faster than ever before, can help maintain all of your drives in tip top shape, can warn of impending disaster, and wrestle data from dying and nearly dead drives . . . before it's too late.

SpinRite works at a really low level (Below file system level) to fix bad sectors - or if not possible to recover, to mark them unusable (So vista doesn't go trying to partition that sector). It is very likely that it can recover the HDD so that you can repartition it and install an OS on it.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3371586/SpinRite_6.0

From there the filesystem may also be heavily damaged so you will need to use vista's installer to repartition the hard drive. If it says there's a partition at the partition screen when installing vista then delete it and select 'unallocated space' and then click next.