Okay, so I want to re-install XP (again) because after raging and gracefully slamming my fists onto the keyboard of my netbook, I think I may have just destroyed the hard drive. When I used the prepared flash drive for installing Windows XP (using wintoflash.)

I don't see the hard drive I have on the list; C: is there, I can tell it's my flash drive though, as my real hard drive has way more then just 1GB available. So I try to both format it as ntfs and install and also leaving it intact with FAT32, it just encounters an error and says it can't continue because it's corrupt or something, and to press F3 to quit. I've tried installing from and on both a 2GB drive and 4GB Micro SD card, and lists both as corrupt when installing. Which is a lie, because I can use it just fine on any other OS that can see basic files and folders.

The general overview is I'm not sure if I killed my hard drive or not because I can't get into any OS, so I'm downloading a netbook remix of Ubuntu to prepare on a flash drive to hope that will work as a temporary solution. If my hard drive has gone bai-bai like I think it has, should I get an external one to install XP on or work on getting one custom built for 300$ or so, because I really don't want to wait. If it hasn't, how can I still use XP on it if it can't recognize the hard drive at all? And yes, I mean XP. I really don't want to use anything else unless I have to, so please try to not shove Linux in my face

(edit: apparently ubuntu is linux)

Thanks.

Hard drive could have failed actually, do you have any other hard drives that you can use?

Win7 /could/ work decently instead of XP, though otherwise Ubuntu will work handily for many tasks, even if you never even install it.

That said, if it helps, hit Alt+F2 (from within the Ubuntu desktop - either installed or "Live"/uninstalled), run "gparted" (hit enter after typing it if it helps), enter your password if asked (but do NOT change anything unless I'm incorrectly assuming you have no idea what's going on at this step), and if it appears to detect both a) your hard drive and b) the used space in it, it shouldn't be corrupted. Likewise, if you can take a screenshot of what it shows and upload it, it will reveal a load more information to me or others.

If it helps, it should look something like this:


Edit: You should be able to take a screenshot by hitting PrntScr w/o any modifier keys (e.g. Ctrl). It will popup a window where you can save it to, say, the flash drive, then upload it.

Then, yeah, sounds likely that the entire drive has gone bad.

In the meantime, Ubuntu works nicely if you can get used to it [I personally prefer KDE to Gnome, though, and in general it is slightly more similar to Windows]

On second thought freeze, would it be a viable option to open up the thing and see if nothing is disconnected rather then me completely obliterating it altogether?

I personally know someone who slammed their laptop in rage and killed the harddrive. He had to buy a new one. Hard drives are very shock-sensitive components during operation. They spin at around 200 times a second and a shock strong enough to make the head crash into the platters at that speed can have disastrous consequences. Let that be a lesson.