Won't load, reboots continually

[cigarman]

Hello,

I'm trying to fix a problem on a co-worker's laptop, an HP Pavilion ze1110. When turned on, the unit attempts to load XP but fails. Then it reboots automatically and trys again. This process continues until I power the unit down.

I was able to load the system recovery discs, but this changed nothing.

After this I ran fdisk to check on the partitions. Found something called "Hidden C: drive" It appeared to have two partitons on it, one Fat16 the other NTFS. After loading the first system recovery disk there were some option regarding "hybernating the drive." I bypassed that and just went through normal system recovery.

I then took out the partitions and re-loaded the system recovery discs again. This went through fine, but the unit continues as before--reboot after reboot without a successful loading of XP.

My guess is that the problem might be this "hidden drive C:" thing. As I write this, the unit continues to reboot, fail to load and re-start continually.

Anyone with any ideas or suggestions for a fix would be appreciated. The owner of the unit got it on Ebay. Don't know what he paid for it. Don't know if maybe it got damaged during shipping or something, but I suspect it was sent to him with this problem.

Thanks for your help.

 

[DragonFury]

is the unit getting hot and what type of hdd is it ? found out who made the hdd look up a Low level utility for that hdd samsung sung utilty wd wd utility etc. etc. and maybe low level format the drive . this will wipe any and all information on the drive and writes 0's to it so with win xp u goin to have to redo the partions , and low level formatting will erase any hidden drives as well ..