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Asked: 2021-11-02T10:58:00+00:00 In:

How Do I Format A Hard Drive With Error 20-Fffe-045d

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Hi, I have a Toshiba laptop that had windows vista on it originally. I decided to upgrade to windows 8.1 because it was offered for free through my school. That upgrade took place about a year ago. Six months ago I started getting kernel data in-page error and my laptop shut down at random and most inconvenient moments; such as when I am working on school projects. I ran the widows disk repair utility several times until one day ( 1 week ago) my laptop no longer would boot windows up. So I placed the recovery disk for vista in and attempted to format the hard drive and restore my original os. I received the error 20-fffe-045d only to read now on the blogs that my hard drive is toast. f— windows 8.1, and on that note f— MICROSOFT for frying my laptop. Offer a free os to students… great! Now that s— hit the fan nobody is liable and I lost my $800 machine. I am now running Linux of a live boot usb because thats all I can do with this piece of garbage. If anyone knows of a way to wipe clean the drive and maybe somehow bypass the damaged sectors I would greatly appreciate the information. Being a student money is scarce… can’t afford a new machine or a new hard drive. On a side note, what happened to windows 9?

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    4 Answers

    1. Hard drives die all the time, especially on laptops because they tend to get banged around. If yours died, it has nothing to do with Microsoft or the operating system you attempted to install, it’s more likely the untimely death was caused was misuse or abuse. And if your laptop originally came with Vista, it’s fairly old & not worth anywhere near $800 – you didn’t lose an $800 machine, at worst, you lost a $50 hard drive & whatever time it takes to swap it out & reinstall the OS.
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    2. If you want, you can try to reinstall Vista from the recovery partition on the Toshiba, most have it, my Toshiba does. From off, turn on the laptop and as soon as the bios splash screen (toshiba) appears, hold down the 0, that is zero key, that should take you to a recovery partition and allow a “factory restore” which reinstalls Vista and makes it like the day it was bought. Again this will not likely complete if it is a hard drive issue.
      Windows 9 was changed to Windows 10, for whatever marketing reason.

      To err is human but to really screw things up, you need a computer!

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    3. As Derek states the operating system has nothing to do with a failed/failing hard drive. Vista indicates it’s approximate age. You can do a test of the hard drive by making a bootable cd from the seatools ISO download I will link to. You make the cd, boot to the cd and seatools begins loading, when it loads up in a minute or two, you run the short generic test on the hard drive, if it passes that you run the long generic test, any fail means its done. Formatting the hard drive will not resolve the problem if it is the hard drive. Now if both tests passed then perhaps you have a faulty ram module or the unit is experiencing heat related issues….though it does sound probable it is the hard drive. It can be tested. I don’t know what else to tell you… I have a car, it has 4 tires but no spare, the front tire has blown, BUT I have $0 for any type of repairs etc……I guess that means I’d be walking. Some problems require money to fix them. IF one during the install of windows 8 did a full format as opposed to the quick format, it would mark the bad sectors (not use them) and possibly install, but that is relatively rare as a fix, and usually a temporary solution as the drive continues to degrade, the problem resurfaces. I would test the hard drive to be sure that is the problem. Link to Seatools for DOS, below, DOS version is used because you are making a cd to boot to, Seatools for Windows only works when the computer still loads windows and you can just install the Seatools for Windows, so in this case we use Seatools for Dos. here’s the link

      http://www.seagate.com/ca/en/suppor…

      To err is human but to really screw things up, you need a computer!

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    4. I’m no MS fanboy but I can’t see why putting Windows 8.1 on a computer can possibly kill your hard disk. If it died it would have done so eventually even with Vista on it.

      Always pop back and let us know the outcome – thanks

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