my sister asked me to fix her computer because it was running slow, but it was so slow that i haven't had enough time at once to even open anything. it ran ok in safe mode but when i ran any adaware and spybot it didnt pick anything up. i ran avg free and it just said there were errors with the hard drive. i figured i would just reformat it but she didnt have her windows disc so i only have an xp disc (she has vista) from my mom, which i planned on cracking, but when i went to reformat it said that there wasn't a hard drive. i don't have any idea what's going on here, since it seems to be a problem with the bios and not just the os. i tried to google it but every result was just a question about how to reformat in general (which i've done a bunch of times). i'm just wondering about a place to even start with this, since obviously she has a hard drive, or should i just hand it over to some tech place. i just hate to do that since they are so over priced.

edit: im sure there's a bunch of help posts in here and i wouldn't post if i had any idea where to start.

i honestly don't know how to do any of that. i read somewhere that if you are trying to downgrade from vista home to any version of xp that it just can't happen, but i dont know if this is totally true. im trying to look around for how to find my sata drivers, but I cant find it.

i still dont know if you are being serious climb tree, since you seem to constantly post ridiculous shit.

edit: ive already tried looking for a virus free version of vista, but it was hard enough to find one of xp, and that seems to be worthless now. i'm running vista and so is my girlfriend but we both bought the same laptop from hp, but it doesn't seem to have come with a windows disc. (so if anyone knows anything about this, i would like to know, because i am pretty pissed about not getting a disc, since i had to reformat my desktop a couple times).

also thanks to anyone who gives me help, since i don't even like dealing with my own computer problems, let alone other peoples.

ok, i'll try researching for the make and model of my sisters computer, and now that i think of it, i do remember the third party thing coming up at the bottom of the screen. i just didnt realize what you were talking about at first. thank you though!

it wants me to put the disk for the drivers in the A drive, so i imagine it's asking for a floppy disk, but my sisters laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, so i'm not sure what to do again. ill keep messing around and thanks for the help climbtree.

also, dom, i'm not trying to download anything my sister hasn't already legitimately bought. it just seems dumb to me that she should have to spend hundreds of dollars on something she paid for already just because she misplaced a 2 cent piece of plastic.