hi, i need a little help, i have been trying to reformat my maxdata belinea b.book (2) using the recovery disc that came with it. the problem is that it is not letting me, it says there is no hard disks or drives (cant remember which it says) on the computer even though there is 3 80gb disks with c being the one with the os on. have you any idea how i can do this please. i have windows xp pro sp2 installed

Notebookcheck: Maxdata Belinea b.book 2

Why are you reinstalling?

What were your issues?

The errors you receive indicate perhaps a failed hard drive.

i was trying to wipe the hard drive c with a fresh copy of windows to get rid of clutter etc all hard drives are working fine it seems and no noise coming from either 3. it just wont let me wipe it by not letting me get to the screen where it gives you the options of deleting the partition you want to delete. my local computer shop give me some advice today as to a way round it so will try that tomorrow and let you know. thankyou

Just to clarify: by three drives you mean three partitions on one drive correct?

Were one of the other partitions a Recovery Partition?

Also what did the local shop advise?

no there is 3 hard drives on my laptop each one 80gb and only one has an os on it. the computer shop advised that after reachin the f8 page and agreein you have to press esc and then it will list all the drives and ask which one you want to delete the partition from. i believe that only c will have a partition on it but as i have never actually got to that screen yet i dony know

With all due respect I have never seen a laptop with more than one physical hard drive.

From my research your model is shown as having a single drive of 160GB possibly partitioned into three drives.

Of course it could have been customized to a 80 x 3 = 240GB but that is not a common drive size.

Anyway please try the reinstall again and post back any error messages verbatim.

it definately has 3x80gb drives c,d and e. i tried to do as advised by comp shop and the outcome is i cant get to f8 screen. using both maxdata recovery disc and windows disc results in same message. loads windows files then setup starts windows. get to the welcome to setup screen then the three options enter, repair or f3, both of the 2 first options result in message saying no hdd found and to check connections or manufacturer setup disc then says press f3 to quit setup. hope this helps. thankyou

What you have is one hard drive with three partitions.

But anyway can you still boot into your old Windows?

If not can you open the BIOS Setup and verify that the BIOS sees the hard drive?

When you first start the computer there should be options such as "Start Setup > Press Delete" or sometimes "F2" or perhaps another key.

yes to both, windows is running fine, and then bios does see the drive, i checked that first.

I am finding it difficult to get specs on that laptop but as an educated guess you have a SATA hard drive and XP cannot see it as it requires drivers in order to do so.

On the bottom of Windows Setup after the initial files load you will see "Press F6 To Load Drivers".

If indeed your hard drive is SATA you would need to load SATA drivers at this point otherwise XP will not recognize the hard drive.

Besides the maxdata recovery disc did you receive a drivers and utilities CD?

In order to verify your harddrive make and model you can open the Device Manager by right clicking My Computer then click Manage then Device Manager.

Here click the + next to Disk drives.

What is listed here?