Failed format

For nearly a year now my dad and I have been trying to restore a laptop that I used to own, but died on me. What would happen is it would "bsod" and when restarted, would go to it again. I knew what it was but not why. It's roughly 5 years old now, counting the down time. I'm giving it to him now that I have the replacement, since he only wants it for minor use.

While it won't make a difference mentioning it, the laptop is a Dell XPS m140. The DOS/cmd area is the actual problem. He's booting from a disk and going into the command prompt to format the drive. It shows up as X:\. This is how it looks:

X:\Sources>Format c:
Warning here
Proceed? y
Type of file system (first time was NTFS, second attempt is RAW)

After this it went through the format. But after the format, it tried to create file structures. It started going, then says it failed, and goes back to the drive. I know there's a way around this, but obviously it's beyond any self teaching or training I've had.

We're really just trying to avoid buying anything for it if we can help it. While a new hard drive isn't much, it's nice to know we can save the old one if possible.

 

What version of Windows are you trying to install on that PC?

What about if you try to partition the hard drive from within Windows setup?

 

I think your hdd is defective. Google "ultimate boot cd" and try running one of the diagnostics listed there (e.g. Drive Fitness Test).