I'm in Hell - strange partitioning and stability problems, please help

Hey, all. I need some help.

I just got a new hard drive for my laptop to replace an old one that went bad. Unfortunately, Windows will not install to the laptop (or work, on the one occasion I've succeeded).

Every time I've tried to install Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit), it tells me that it can't format any of the partitions on the hard drive and/ or that Windows could not be installed on unallocated space, always giving me error code 0x80070057.

Booting into cmd and using diskpart gives me generic "I/O error"s when I try to format anything.

Windows XP also gives me an error when trying to format either the hard drive or any particular partition.

The one occasion I did get it to install was by booting up into Ubuntu live and using gparted (which always gives me a warning telling me that the device driver believes the block size to be 2048, but Linux thinks it's 512, whatever that means) and gnome-disks to create a new partition table using the msdos option and then did a (quick) format in NTFS.

It took five hours to install, and once it did, everything (including Windows explorer) started failing randomly within two minutes of booting up the computer.

I also briefly tested a Linux installation on the hard drive and installed a bunch of software using apt-get, which all seemed to work fine (in contrast to Windows, which couldn't modify anything on the filesystem without falling apart).

I deleted Ubuntu after a couple hours of use, but I noticed no problems with it.

All BIOS dianogstic tests (memory, hard drive, etc.) pass with flying colors, other than battery, which fails miserably, because the battery is basically dead.

CD/DVD/USB all work fine, and I was ripping DVDs using an Ubuntu USB install for weeks before I got the new hard drive, with no problems.

I can't figure out for the life of me why this is happening. Does anyone have any ideas? Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated.

Welcome to the forum. Use diskpart to clean the drive DO NOT create paritions then try install let windows create paritions. Are you sure the old hd went bad not the disk controller gone bad?

samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. Use diskpart to clean the drive DO NOT create paritions then try install let windows create paritions. Are you sure the old hd went bad not the disk controller gone bad?

Thank you.

The old HD is definitely bad. How would I test to know if the disk controller is also bad? BIOS diagnostics told me the drive was fine, and Ubuntu allows me to create and format partitions, and seems to install fine.

I tried "clean all" yesterday, and I'm pretty sure it gave me an I/O error.

I may try that again here in a minute; I currently have Ubuntu live doing a slow NTFS format over the entire hard drive to see if that will help, since a quick format allowed me to install W7 last time before failing.

SIW2 said:

Which hard drive precisely?

It's a 500GB hard drive that I just bought at Best Buy (though, in reality, it only has 465GB of space on it (is that normal? I'm aware most devices have a little overhead, but 465 still seems a little low).

I believe that Windows likes to call it disk 0, and Linux mounts it as /dev/sda.

I found a post online saying that the block size issue can be solved by using the Linux command

Code:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd bs=2048

, but I CTRL+C'd out of it before it was finished out of frustration (had written ~190GB); it didn't seem to help anything.

SIW2 said:

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government,” Edward Abbey

I love this, by the way.

plzhelpiminhell said:

It's a 500GB hard drive that I just bought at Best Buy (though, in reality, it only has 465GB of space on it

The Windows explorer UI displays hard drive storage as a powers of 1024. Therefore a 500GB hard drive of 500,000,000,000 bytes will be reported by the Windows UI as though it is only 500,000,000,000 / (1024*1024*1024) bytes, or 465.66 GB

but do not worry, you really do have 500GB. To check, do

start > run > wmic logicaldisk get size,freespace,caption

it should say you have 500GB

johnhoh said:

The Windows explorer UI displays hard drive storage as a powers of 1024. Therefore a 500GB hard drive of 500,000,000,000 bytes will be reported by the Windows UI as though it is only 500,000,000,000 / (1024*1024*1024) bytes, or 465.66 GB

Oh, right, of course. That makes sense.

I just assumed they'd display the hard drive storage in the same base-10 number system used by most people and program outputs and every society on Earth, instead of using some obscure exponential system subsequently reformatted to look like said base-10 system.

But, no, of course not; that would be silly. What was I thinking?