Hi - It's been a long time since I visited with you and I re registered since my old user name seems to have been deleted or some such. Nice to be back.

I had a virus on my IBM T42 Thinkpad notebook and after I determined that it was impossible to remove I decided to clean up the computer.So I used DBAN to wipe the hard drive, which worked fine. But when I tried to reinstall Win XP - from a licensed disk that I own and have used several times in the past on this machine - I get a message saying that WIN XP (Home Edition) cannot format the drive and the disk may be damaged. Any ideas on what I might be able to do. Also, I assume that installing a new hard drive will solve the problem - is this correct?

As always, many thanks.

Best,

Jon

Picking up a new drive for the laptop should resolve it. I'm not familiar with DBAN, but it would seem to me that it wiped the drive, but left it in a state that XP can't understand. Instead of formatting an existing partition on the drive, perhaps you should use the advanced Setup with Disk Management to delete all existing partitions and create a new one for the install?
-steve

_________________
stephen boots
Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020
"Life's always an adventure with computers!"