XP reinstall freezes

A friend brought his laptop over with a strange problem. For whatever reason, he decided he could fix some problem with a reinstall. Any way, the issue is that during the reinstall, when the hard drive is being formatted, it freezes at one of 2 points. If doing a Quick format, it freezes at 20 percent. In a full format it freezes at 17 percent. I replaced the hard drive with the one from a laptop I have with a bad display. Both drives respond the same. There were 3 or 4 attempts of each, with each drive. The computer is a Compaq Presario 2135, 30GB original,40GB replacement, hard drive, 512 MB ram. He has the original Compaq Op Sys disk, I don't think it's a restore disk. I put the original drive in a USB case and attached it to mine, went to Disk Management, and tried to format it. DM said it was formatting, but after an hour there was no progress, even though the drive activity light looked like something was happening. Then I repeated the process with the other drive…same thing. The formatting could not be stopped and the computer had to be powered off. The fan and heat sink were cleaned, but there was no change.

Hi wallyb, welcome to WhatTheTech. From you're description, I'm not sure if either drive is working so the test you did by swapping out the old drive with one from the computer with a defective display may not have accomplished anything. What you need is a known good hard drive that you can put in the laptop. One other possibility is defective ram. It ca cause some strange problems, but this really does sound like a hard drive problem so that's the way I would approach it. One other thing you could do is put the original drive back in then run the drive manufacturers diagnostic against it to see if it detects any problems. Most HD manufacturers have a diag utility (almost always an iso file) you can download and create a bootable CD from.