I do PC repair for low-income people in our neighborhood, and I was brought a Dell Inspiron 1520 running 32-bit Vista.
It wouldn't boot, even with safe mode, and when I booted from a disk no OS displayed.
I ran a utility that scans for and 'fixes' bad sectors (I assume that it merely makes them unwritable). There were 17 bad sectors that could not be fixed. I used another utility and ran a low-level format.
Hours later I used a Dell Vista CD and attempted to install Windows. Some time before it hit 100% on step 2 (Expanding Files) it gave me the 0x80070570 error. I know there's nothing wrong with the disk, but I tried it again and got the same results. Then I tried an install using a MS Windows CD, which did prompt me for the product key, but when it got to the Expanding Files step it just styed there at 0%. For hours...
Is the drive just too far gone to sustain the OS? I thought that if you did a low-level format it rendered the bad sectors as unusable, but this is a 120GB drive. They really can't afford a new HD. Shouldn't I be able to install and run Vista on the 100 plus gigabytes that are uncorrupted?
It wouldn't boot, even with safe mode, and when I booted from a disk no OS displayed.
I ran a utility that scans for and 'fixes' bad sectors (I assume that it merely makes them unwritable). There were 17 bad sectors that could not be fixed. I used another utility and ran a low-level format.
Hours later I used a Dell Vista CD and attempted to install Windows. Some time before it hit 100% on step 2 (Expanding Files) it gave me the 0x80070570 error. I know there's nothing wrong with the disk, but I tried it again and got the same results. Then I tried an install using a MS Windows CD, which did prompt me for the product key, but when it got to the Expanding Files step it just styed there at 0%. For hours...
Is the drive just too far gone to sustain the OS? I thought that if you did a low-level format it rendered the bad sectors as unusable, but this is a 120GB drive. They really can't afford a new HD. Shouldn't I be able to install and run Vista on the 100 plus gigabytes that are uncorrupted?
