Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of chargerbabe
chargerbabe

asked on

Windows Install Hangs at Setup when Formatting Partition

I'm not a technical person so would appreciate answers in layman's terms..

Have a dell optiplex gx620 working just fine and i decided to reinstall cd to make it fresh and delete old files, encountering different problems. I get as far as creating a new partition and formating it and then it hangs. When I do hard drive diagnostics it also hangs. Any help wouldbe greatly appreciated!
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of MiniDevo
MiniDevo
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of chargerbabe
chargerbabe

ASKER

Thanks for the replies.How can I run the diagnostic CD from dell if windows won't even start?
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
okay but i just to make me feel better what could i have done wrong in a matter of minutes to turn a perfectly working machine into one with a bad hard drive? all i was doing was reinstalling. I reinstalled xp successfully and the problem started when I tried to download and install the drivers, I started getting error messages and thats when I did the reinstall again which failed.
gx620 has been around awhile - ide drives are good for about 4 years then start dropping like flies.  learned that the hard way after reusing a drive out of a gx and putting 10 years of scanned family pics on it, just for it to fail a year later - ughh!
I was able to run diagnostics bia dell resource cd, the extended one checked EVERYTHING and it says everything passed. Still a hard drive problem?
Go into the BIOS and search for the option to restore the default BIOS settings. Try installing Windows XP. If it fails again, try with a different CD disc. Another option is to try with a different CD Drive.
Dell's Hard Drive Diagnostics are very good and allthough the advice provided above is very accurate and the drive will probably die soon, if it passed the Dell's Advanced Extended diagnostics, the problem should not be the HDD at this moment.
Bits ...
Since you mention you are a layman... to get into the BIOS you need to press on F2 when the Dell Logo appears on your screen.
Bits ...
I'd try running also HDD regenerator
http://www.dposoft.net/
There is a trial version of the application, you can download and run it. It lets you create a boot device which allows you to check your hdd for problems. The trial version fixes only one bad sector of the HDD (if any), but when it finds something, you'll just know it's the hard drive.
SOLUTION
Avatar of rindi
rindi
Flag of Switzerland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Rindi is correct here. Dell diag tools are weak when compared with HDD vendor made tools. First of all find out the model of your HDD. You can do it by opening the box or looking in BIOS.
Also, did you check that machine is not overheating? Is there dust in it?
thank you for all your replies. after two long days of doing things again and again and expecting different results, dusting the parts, downloading seatools and even that hanging, i finally bought a 35$ hard drive. Im sure my 2 days is worth more than that but im sure most of you can understand sometimes its not the price sometimes you just dont want to give up until youve figured it out....i surrender...
Yes, exactly. Even after buying new drive you make attempts to find out the cause of the problem as this is human nature =))
So with new drive it worked, am I right?
dont have the drive yet ordered online..
Ah, ok I see. As you will have to open the box in any case, open it and clean up the dust using vacuum cleaner.
If you have warranty on the drive you can send it to the vendor for replacement. My guess is that when you use the new hard drive you will be able to install windows.

Don't forget to install the drivers from the driver cd, if there is any supplied by the PC.