Hi, My mate had a problem with his laptop not booting. And in the end i decided the only thing to do was to reformat

The problem is when doin a fresh install the formatting part gets stuck at 44%.

Could this be a problem with the HDD?

Any help would be great thanks.

It could possibly be the HDD. is it freezing during the formatting process? Is it constantly freezing at exactly 44%?

Yeh exactly 44% mate. done it 3 times now. Sound like a dodgy drive?

Ok, try restarting the setup in windows and and go into the recovery console.

If you can access the drive (hopefully it's set as the C:\ partition) and type chkdsk. Hopefully that will give us some more info.

When i do that mate i get "THE VOLUME APPEARS TO HAVE ONE OR MORE UNRECOVERABLE PROBLEMS"

If i choose to do a quick format it does it fine and installs windows alough seems slow once into windows.

I'm usually reluctant to tell people over the net to replace hardware but I'm starting to lean towards it here.

Before you go out and shell out $$$ (sorry no pound symbol) on a new hard drive, is there an unused hard drive you could try to install on. If everything goes well then at least we'll have a god idea that it's a bad hard drive.

I really do suspect though that the hard drive is probably pooched.

PS. A quick format would look over disk errors since it doesn't scan the drive for problems, it just rewrites the file tables and whatnot which is what makes it so much quicker.

Lol I guess can't write h*onkey dorey ... i wonder how many times I've written it and not noticed that it starred it out

I think you have confirmed my thoughts mate. Ill go get a new HDD tomorrow as i havent got another one to try.

Thanks again.