My wife has an old Z505SX that she adores, and recently she asked me
to reinstall the OS (2K) on it. The Sony is a backup laptop for light
travel so generally it's not used much. Daily work is done on a
Toshiba XP.

I popped the OS install in the CD-ROM external drive and choose the
full install version that included a new reformatting and cleaning of
the HDD.
This type of full reimaging is something I have done a dozen times on
the various laptops in the house.
BUT, this time the process stopped at 98% of completed task, I get an error
message that sounds something like this: **The formatting or sectoring
of the HDD is not complete, the HDD is possibly damaged.**

Well, I have tried the IBM/Hitachi tools, Drive Fitness Test and several others.
BUT nothing will boot from the floppy.
So now the SONY does one thing, when I incert a floppy it reboots in circle.
The software never fires up, the screen goes black, I do have the DOS cursour
blinking for a few seconds and then it reboots again and again and so
on until I shut it of using the ON/OFF buttons on the side.

It boots from the CD-drive but will not install anything. The message
from the system is : **The Harddisc is not fully formatted or
sectored, try formatting it again, remeber that all data will be lost-
type of message...**
GUESS what happens when I try to run it agian, it stops at 98%
completed and gives the same message,**The formatting or sectoring
of the HDD is not complete, the HDD is possibly damaged.**  

Any ideas apart from using the Z505SX to tie down my tent come next fall elk
hunting season??

Regards

Gregor
Oslo/Norway

---

Clarification of Question by elkhunter-ga on 18 Dec 2004 13:04 PST

Presto!!

Managed to boot DiscKiller 5.1 and it wiped everything in the Sony's
main partition. After that the W2K installed like a dream.
No mentioning of any flawed parts on the HDD, so I have no clue as to
what went on earlier. 

So, one SONY Vaio rebooted and one happy wife. My evening is saved.

Have a merry Christmas

You know a lot of stuff so this suggestion may seem unproductive.

1) During the HDD reformat operation I believe you are asked if you
want to create a partition or let it format the whole disk (at least
that's the way the XP version works).  Consider telling it to create a
partition of say, 80% of the disk. Maybe it will complete that much
successfully.

2) During the boot operation you can interrupt the boot with a special
key, (F2 on my machine) in which you can toggle the floppy drive
between a boot drive and non-boot drive.  Presumably you *have* told
the BIOS that the floppy is  a boot drive for the purposes of the
test.

3) Lastly, IBM/Hitachi makes a new high-performance laptop drive, the 7K60.
It sports a 8MB cache on a 7200 rpm platter with 60GB capacity. 
It is also quieter than the 4200 rpm drive it replaced and had similar
physical, electrical, and thermal properties.


http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/53989D390D44D88F86256D1F0058368D/$file/T7K60_sp2.0.pdf


---I am not a researcher   ------

Congratulations. Good to know.... "DiscKiller 5.1".

Caution....all I could find about the aforementioned "utility" is an
old boot sector virus (but spelled with a "k") or ware_ez related.