Windows Vista Vista install failing

Me again After a suspected rootkit virus wiped pretty much everything, I'm trying to reinstall everything. At the moment, I have XP SP3 in.

No matter what I try to install Vista to, it always fails, saying that the hard drive doesn't have any system volume information, even when I delete and recreate the partitions! Also, when I did that, it created a badly-formatted FAT16 partition - uh? Even attempting to install over the XP SP3 drive (do not want to do that really) failed, same error. Any ideas, short of reformatting everything again? (which I am not going to do either)

EDIT: Attempting to reformat using Disk Management in XP also doesn't work with the following error coming up in the Event Console:

LDM
The parameter is incorrect. (80070057).

 

Go to the HDD manufacturer's website and see if they have a utility to Zero (Low-Level) format the drive. You would then need to use their partitioning and formatting tools to make the partition/s and format them. The tool might specifically talk about making the partition for Vista.

 

We tried that before - no such thing as a low-level format anymore, and please note that all three hard drives refused to play ball, not just one, in the Vista setup.

 

So I'll be stuck on XP then, because I'm not going to erase all the data on the drives. And there wasn't a tool I could find on Western Digital's site either.

 

Look at the instructions for Data Lifeguard

If the problem was a rootkit it might have caused problems on all the HDDs (I haven't worked on them, but I know they are very nasty).

Is there any RAID system set up? That might be a source.

Matt

 

Can someone mark this as resolved? My dad got Linux to work (formatting the partition) when I couldn't, Linux-n00b that I am. This is posted from Vista.

There wasn't a deliberate RAID setup before, rather a mess, and when trying to install Vista myself, there was no RAID at all. And yes, the rootkit did cause problems on all the hard drives, hence why we only recovered two (clean) partitions out of the 5 there were. (and one was a 10GB backup partition...)