[snarebyte]

I recently recieved a Toshiba Satellite M45-S359 that had a problem with it'd hard drive. I went to reinstall Windows XP and got so far as deleting the old partition and got some kind of error screen. Not the blue screen of death, but some other evil looking error message. I didn't get a chance to read it because it shut down on me. When I restarted it and began the setup again to try and finish the format it said that it couldn't begin setup because there was no hard drive. I figured that this was because I did not get to create a new partition. Because I couldn't use the XP cd I switched to the 98 cd to see if I could use the Fdisk program on it. When it started up it asked if I would like to use large disk support and I said yes, then I got the message that said "Error Reading Fixed Disk". If it is just a bad hard drive and need to get a new one, then it is an easy fix. But I would rather not have to buy one so is there something that I can do to fix this problem? Thanks in adance for all of your help.

[TheMajor]

Probably broken. Try accessing and formatting again a few times with different programs.

[FlashDude]

The hdd is probably on its last leg's, It may be the MBR is corrupt, If you have a floppy with msdos you can boot from it and type in A:> fdisk /mbr , You may also try this.

"Error Reading Fixed Disk"

You get this message in 98 because the hdd was formatted in NTFS and not Fat32, When you get that error message follow the instructions to create a primary partition then If the hdd isn't toast you should be good to go.

[snarebyte]

If I enter fdisk/mbr it says that the master boot code has not been updated. What does that mean?

[jeremy]

probably that it have bad sectors , i suggest youll get that hd checked with the manufacturer diagnostic software