# Invalid or damaged Bootable partition



## jtbleek (Apr 26, 2005)

A friend gave me their old HP zt1175 with XP, but when booting up the message "Invalid or damaged Bootable partition". I have no disks for the machine all the possible solutions I have found so far require the disks. Does anyone know a fix for this problem not involving the disks? Thank you.


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## lorjack (Nov 15, 2007)

Nope, i can't think of any fix that doesn't require a CD.


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## deleted010511 (Apr 29, 2009)

It sounds like the Hard Drive is damaged or needs to be replaced. see the following steps to test your hard drive:

1.
Restart the notebook PC.
2.
When the HP or Compaq logo screen displays, press the F10 key repeatedly. The System BIOS Options Menu will appear.
3.
When the System BIOS Options Menu is displayed, select Tools using the arrow keys.
4.
Select Hard Drive Test .
The hard drive test will run a short test and a long test. The entire test may take 45 - 60 minutes to complete. To properly diagnose the hard drive, the entire test must be run. If that tests fine. 

You need to get a Windows XP CD. It doesn't need to be included with this machine. If you had that you could boot from the Windows and get to the Recovery console to Repair the MBR or to run the System File Checker etc or do a Repair install.


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## jtbleek (Apr 26, 2005)

spike2me said:


> It sounds like the Hard Drive is damaged or needs to be replaced. see the following steps to test your hard drive:
> 
> 1.
> Restart the notebook PC.
> ...




I tried this but when I hit F10 the following comes up:

1400 Mhz Pentium 4 CPU
External Cache: 512K installed
Hard Disk boot sector invalid
Press "h" to retry hard disk, any other key for next device
no bootable CD in ATAPI CD-ROM
Booting from LAN


goes on the say ethernet controller test failed and trys to boot from hard disk again


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## lorjack (Nov 15, 2007)

The hard drive is gone.


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## jtbleek (Apr 26, 2005)

lorjack said:


> The hard drive is gone.


I'm skeptical of this because I tried another hard drive and it does the same thing


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## deleted010511 (Apr 29, 2009)

go into the Bios, does it see the HDD? Is it a SATA drive or an EIDE/ATA drive?


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## jtbleek (Apr 26, 2005)

spike2me said:


> go into the Bios, does it see the HDD? Is it a SATA drive or an EIDE/ATA drive?


IDE/ATA drive.....Insyde Bios...the only thing I can say about it recognizing the HD is that it says "Internal Hard Disk = 30GB".....which is the correct size of the hard drive


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## deleted010511 (Apr 29, 2009)

Ok try formatting the HDD with a 3rd party utility Boot disc like Partition Magic, Acornis, Disk Part. If that boot disc sees the HDD and it formats it NTFS then put the XP CD in and install.


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## jtbleek (Apr 26, 2005)

Is there any free ones out there that you know of? I tried Partition Logic, but it spits out errors and won't work.


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## nego-oh-oh (Jan 22, 2006)

you might try putting the disk in another computer,
then run chkdsk on it.


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## dai (Jul 2, 2004)

contact hp for recovery disks


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## jerrodbug (Jul 28, 2009)

before you do that, make sure you dont have any flash/usb drives plugged in to the computer, that can occasionally cause a problem if your bios is set to allow booting from a USB. (just ran into this problem myself


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