Miscellaneous laptop discussions forum: GATEWAY W350A Laptop HDMI AMD TURION 64WEBCAM 1.5 MEGAPIXEL

OK Ive never had so many problems reinstalling an operating system as i have on this machine.was working fine.next day nothing.All i got was check cable exiting pcm no operating system found.ok i did what i could but ,not my pc. friend never did any back ups or restore points and didnt make the recovery cds i have the original cd thats it.ok first try on install there were a few errors .i got into command prompt and got them fixed fix boot fix mbr fix bcd.all completed .ran check disk finds no errors but at the end says something as could not find or read and the number 50.sorry i know thats that just what it said but im tring to remember everything.hard drive shows in BIOS .checed drive says ok SO THE INSTALL NOW GETS TO 2. SAYS INSTALLING.But never does i get this message at the endWindows could not assign a drive letter on disk 0, The specified partition does not exiton the target disk. The error occured while preparing the partiton selected for installation.Error code 0x80300002.then stops. during set up when the box comes up thats suppose to have the operating sys on it its blank it says load hard drive drivere,ive looked and looked but do not know what to look for in the files nothing says hard disc. im sure its under some other abreaveation im sure but dont know which one.so no driver loaded i dont beleave.Also another problem is in BIOS i can only scroll to time and date it will not let me scroll to the hard drive or anything else why would that be?its taken me along time just to get it to the install screen,pheww!.its a nice machine very well taken care of.no cameras had been attached no printers no cards.hard drive light stays on and shows its working.But even after all that im beleaving its bad. ive used win 98..tryed to install xp went threw then it requires a format so i do so it gets to 100% then says cannot be formatted.now closing.Im so hoping for an answer ive seen many people having the same problem with vista.i hope someone has found the answer..thank you all replys appreciated