I'm having trouble with recovery,can anyone help?

Question

I have Compaq Presario 5300US. I tried my recovery disk just to get it back to factorry condition> After disk finished it was fine til I rebooted. I gotten a red blinking screen that said contact Compaq. I did that and he emailed me a download that would clear the harddrive. That download was to be put on a floppy. I did that and inserted it and the screen went greenand it said to take c d out of c d rom, in which there was no disk. So now I tried to reinstall XP home from disk and it installs up to the point where it starts to copy files, It always stops at 14% and it says either I can retry by pressing enter or esc. to skip over that particular file. I tried to skip over the file but I get the same message but a differnt file to skip over.Can anyone help me with this problem for I am trying to fix this for a friend and now I'm in a bind. I am basically a beginner so if you can explain the procedure in the easiest format that would be great. Thankyou all

Answer 1

to check your hard drive for errors I would recomend that you check your hard disk for errors and also do a complete erase manually first.

http://bootdisk.com (Windows 98SE OEM version) You need a floopy

Once you create the startup disk put it in your computer turn it on then select option 2 because recovery CD can not be booted from DOS

Then type in the following command prompt:
Format C: /s (Format your hard drive and erase everything)


Once done use the next command prompt:
Scandisk /all /surface */surface is optional this will scan the entire hard drive slowly to see if there is damage sectors so if you have a large hard drive its best for you to run it when you have things to do so you do not have to watch your PC.

Once done doing the floppy you can restart then change the boot sequence back to CDROM first and then your recovery CD should work.

Answer 2

the hard drive got damage bad I would say is to reformat if u can