I have a HP pavillion dv6 notebook that somebody gave me. It has Windows Vista installed on it, and somehow it got ruined. I don't know what actually happened, but Windows vista will not boot. It just hangs at the loading screen, which is why I want to format it. I burned dban 2.2.6 to a DVD and after inserting the disk it gave me this error: "error no config file found". I decided to try dban 1.0.7, and it did boot up, however after I typed "autonuke" it began running and shortly gave me this error: "DBAN finished with non-fatal errors This is usually caused by the disks with bad sectors send the log file with all support requests" I also tried dban 2.0.0, and it wouldn't even boot to the disk even though I have it set to in the BIOS. dban 1.0.6 gave me a similar "non-fatal error" message. Why isn't this working? I assume it's just because the hard drive is bad. Is there anything I can do?
2 Answers
If your partition table is screwed up, it would cause some of the issues you stated in your question and may even cause your issues with DBAN. I would burn a GPartEd live CD and attempt to delete all of the partitions on the hard drive (this is easy to do in GPartEd). If this doesn't work, then you probably need a new hard drive.
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I'm not entirely sure DBAN even looks at the partition table - it's supposed to nuke the entire disk. (Also, it's "GParted", not "GPartEd".) Jan 28, 2011 at 15:45
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Sorry @grawity but it is GPartEd because it stands for Gnome Partition Editor. The home page of their website even supports this as you can see in the following link gparted.sourceforge.net. What I was saying about DBAN being screwed up by the partition table was, the partition table COULD be affecting DBAN even though the only thing DBAN does is write ones and zeros over the whole drive. If DBAN is screwing up and Windows is screwing up, the only thing in common other than using the hard drive is that they both deal with the partition table. I mean all of this with kind regards.– DavidJan 28, 2011 at 16:18
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Perhaps, but since both DBAN and the GParted Live CD are based on Linux, they would probably break the same way. // As for the name... I still say it's GParted because that's how it is written in the same website you linked to. "GParted is a free partition editor for graphically managing your disk partitions." :) I know, it's really nothing, but it's one of those few things that are unimportant yet get on my nerves. Sorry. :\ Jan 28, 2011 at 18:33
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I do see what you mean @grawity. I have been using that tool for a long time and must have picked up the habit due to be knowing what the acronym means. Keep in mind that different tools look at things differently and do things differently. Just because DBAN is having issues doesn't mean it isn't worth a show at trying GParted on it.– DavidJan 28, 2011 at 19:04
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@Anthony, did my solution fix your issue? Did GParted fix you issue?! I am very curious. I noticed that you accepted my answer but I was just wanting to confirm. (Excited)– DavidJan 29, 2011 at 3:41
HP has a restore partition, I would Not format it, you can restore the PC to factory condition easily. Formatting will destroy this feature.
See this article
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00809678&cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en
