Reformatting HD w/o partition

[pinoy]

Synopsis:
My HD got a virus, thus slowing down my pc so bad. Since there are no important documents I need from my C: partition (my pix and MP3s are stored in secondary drive), I decided to reformat. Everything was looking great until I encountered an error message, "The file Asms on Window XP is needed". I searched, and found a way to fix it through this. My problem didn't go away.

Now, every time I try to start from scratch, I'm getting this error message, " Error reading OS".

I'm on my wits end. Thanks in advance for the help.

Gorio

 

[ZBOLTZ]

Maybe do a low level format. Most companies provide diagnostics programs to allow you to do a low level format on their drives. That might ensure that you totally clean everything off of the drive as a regular format might not totally clean it all.

 

[Aarondeep]

How did you perform the format? What steps did you do. Also don't bother with low-level format You might need to clear out the master boot record as well.

 

[pinoy]

Originally posted by: aarondeep
How did you perform the format? What steps did you do. Also don't bother with low-level format You might need to clear out the master boot record as well.

-boot from CD
-deleted the current (old) partition
-created a new partition w/ max. amt. of space alloted to it, then formatted the drive as NTFS
-Once XP was partially installed ( I had 39 minutes more of work), that was when "The file 'Asms' on Windows XP Professional CD-ROM is needed" message appeared.

 

[kh4130]

^^ As ZboltZ said -- try a formatting utility like DBAN?

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

 

[Captante]

Originally posted by: kh4130
^^ As ZboltZ said -- try a formatting utility like DBAN?

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Depending on what infected your HD you may actually need to do this ... in addition it might be a good idea to zero-fill the drive while your at it which I believe dban can also do ... I've actually had drives get corrupted to the point where doing this was the only way to get them to function correctly.