hard disk on pavilion dv7 is detected but not wanting to be nice

[thegrayt]

yesterday i tried to install windows xp from a usb drive. it didnt work the first few times but when i disable acpi it worked and it started setup. i followed the instructions and it made me do a partitioning thing. i made everything into one blank partition and it was formatting into ntfs (i didnt choose quick so it took like 2 hours to format). when it got to 100%, it gave some kind of error message saying that it couldnt fomat it and if i wanted to retry the formatting. i retryed formatting but chose the quick option this time. of course, same error. i turned my computer off for a while after that because i wanted to do other stuff. also i set my hard drive to ide mode for compatibility because the stupid ahci drivers wont load. anyway, i turned my computer back on and i pressed f9 to load the usb and see if i can redo the install. but then i saw a thing that said something like “hard disk error. run hard disk check with the system fix thing.” and under it it said “hard drive 1 (3f1)”. i thought that xp might have deleted the mbr and i could just rebuild it. i looked up how to fix it, and it said to do some thing where you unplug everything and take out the battery and hold the power for 30s. i did that and it still didnt work. i also read that resetting the bios to how it was made originally will fix it so i did that. i even changed the sata mode back to ahci but it still didnt work. i then got really sad. i tried to use the partition logic program (from visopsys), gparted, and the windows installer to see if i can fix it but the first 2 didnt even see the disk. but then I saw windows installer command prompt saw it in diskpart. i cleaned the hard disk and tried to create a primary ntfs partition, but it gave me a crc error thing. i then tried to straight up use the windows installer partiton tool that comes with it and it almost worked until i clicked create partiton. then it gave an error and said i couldnt make a partition here. i unscrewed the back hard disk container and i saw 2 shiny grey things. i dont know if i have 2 hard disks or if one of them is a shiny grey things for something else because the hard disk is just one 700gb thing. i think it might be something with the sata connecters because i kind of dropped my notebook during the install but i honestly dont know and i dont know how to fix the sata connectors because the last screw wont come off. am i cooked? (edit: i dont know if this message is too long but i tried to give all the details about what happened)

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Is there a reason you are installing XP on the notebook?

Even if you can, you would not find any drivers for most of the hardware it comes with.

If you can read all 25 characters of the Windows 7 product key on the PC's case, I recommend you install W7 64 bit, which was the operating system that originally came with your notebook.

You can also buy a recovery kit for your notebook from this vendor at the link below.

Computer Surgeons - Recovery Kit 679228-002 For HP Pavilion Entertainment Notebook PC Model Number d...