One of my dads co-workers gave him a laptop that didn't work, which he then gave to me.
It "works", but the hard drive is fuxxored. And to boot, it's got like this ridiculously tiny hard drive so I can't just buy any ol' laptop drive. It's way too old to support USB booting.
It's like a P2 300MHz with 128MB RAM.
It came with Windows 98 installed. I was able to boot up, mess around in it, etc. My dad had told me that the hard drive was fucked up and that scandisk was fucked up. I skipped scandisk on startup and it appeared to boot fine and such. I tried to reformat it, and first my XP disc would crash it when it loaded FAT drivers, or something. I made a new "lite" XP disc with a shit ton of stuff deleted/skimmed down. This got me to the setup menu.
I deleted the only partition and created a new one. I tried an NTFS quick format and XP told me that it was corrupted or damaged. I then tried a few other OS's.
Ubuntu did not even get to the install screen.
After an hour of letting Xubuntu load, I gave up because it too hadn't even got to the install screen.
Windows NT couldn't format it.
Windows 98 froze at 3% format.
Using Hiren's Boot CD, I tried a few HDD diagnostic things, including HDD Regenerator. Most of them froze or crashed at a certain point. Each time was consistently at the beginning, so I tried an old trick. I tried making a 1GB partition and then making another partition with the rest of the drive (a whopping 7GB!!!) and was then going to install on the second partition. NT wanted to format the first partition before it would let me through. So I tried XP again. I tried to create a partition on the unallocated space and ... nothing happened. I hit C, set a size, but no changes were made. I deleted the first partition, and now I have two unallocated sizes, one with the size of the first partition and the other the rest of the drive. I cannot make new partitions, and hitting install BSOD's.
So. I've come to the conclusion that the HDD is not to be bargained with.
Anybody got any interesting ideas that I could use it for instead? And by interesting, I do indeed mean ghetto.
It "works", but the hard drive is fuxxored. And to boot, it's got like this ridiculously tiny hard drive so I can't just buy any ol' laptop drive. It's way too old to support USB booting.
It's like a P2 300MHz with 128MB RAM.
It came with Windows 98 installed. I was able to boot up, mess around in it, etc. My dad had told me that the hard drive was fucked up and that scandisk was fucked up. I skipped scandisk on startup and it appeared to boot fine and such. I tried to reformat it, and first my XP disc would crash it when it loaded FAT drivers, or something. I made a new "lite" XP disc with a shit ton of stuff deleted/skimmed down. This got me to the setup menu.
I deleted the only partition and created a new one. I tried an NTFS quick format and XP told me that it was corrupted or damaged. I then tried a few other OS's.
Ubuntu did not even get to the install screen.
After an hour of letting Xubuntu load, I gave up because it too hadn't even got to the install screen.
Windows NT couldn't format it.
Windows 98 froze at 3% format.
Using Hiren's Boot CD, I tried a few HDD diagnostic things, including HDD Regenerator. Most of them froze or crashed at a certain point. Each time was consistently at the beginning, so I tried an old trick. I tried making a 1GB partition and then making another partition with the rest of the drive (a whopping 7GB!!!) and was then going to install on the second partition. NT wanted to format the first partition before it would let me through. So I tried XP again. I tried to create a partition on the unallocated space and ... nothing happened. I hit C, set a size, but no changes were made. I deleted the first partition, and now I have two unallocated sizes, one with the size of the first partition and the other the rest of the drive. I cannot make new partitions, and hitting install BSOD's.
So. I've come to the conclusion that the HDD is not to be bargained with.
Anybody got any interesting ideas that I could use it for instead? And by interesting, I do indeed mean ghetto.
