Hard Drive corrupt? Windows Won't Install?

G-Man

2011-09-04 09:36:35 UTC

I'm having trouble with a hard drive I have bought second hand. I get the error ‘PXE-E61’ when booting up.

The HDD does work as a second hard drive i.e. I can see it in windows as a slave drive, but I want to run an operating system from it and use it as a single drive in my system. The problem is it won’t complete a windows xp installation, my system boots from Windows XP install CD and runs setup as usual, then asks whether or not to format in NTFS, then after that loads the rest of the windows xp installation files and eventually it says its restarting, but when it comes to restarting to continue with the rest of the windows xp installation, it starts the setup again right from the beginning rather than moving on, like a continuous loop of installing?

Fixes I’ve already tried

Removed the Windows XP cd from the drive between installation restart so it doesn’t boot from it again
Didn’t work

Put the hard drive in working but completely different system and run XP setup.
Didn’t work

Cleaned the Windows XP installation disk (which I’ve used on my other systems with no problems before)
Didn’t work

Loaded system Bios defaults and removed Network boot from startup, so it doesn’t boot from the network rather than the HDD
Didn’t work

Performed a Low Level Format (Told this would be the answer?)
Didn’t work

I can’t perform fdisk from win98 floppy boot disk as once it asks me if I want to enable large disk support I hit ‘Y’ and then it goes straight to saying ‘Error Reading Fixed Disk’
So I can’t fix it with that as suggested on many websites?

So I think that its broken? And can only be used as a second drive? Or does anyone else have any other suggestions to get this thing to boot or install an OS?

Thanks in advance!