basically what I did was following these steps:
Boot the computer with the windows 7 DVD, then instead of selecting
'install windows 7', select the one below that says something about
'REPAIR YOUR COMPUTER"
THEN select the circle 'USE RECOVERY TOOLS ...."
from the next window select to OPEN A COMMAND PROMPT window.
Type in:
diskpart
It may take some time for it to pop up and it will ask you for Administrative privileges. Go ahead and click Yes.
b. Type in:
list disk
It'll show a list of disks.
e.g: http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/6880/diskpart01.png
c. Select the drive you're having issues with.
Do this with the diskpart "select" command. Select your disk out of the list above.
e.g.
select disk 3
d. Clean the drive.
Type in:
clean
e. Create a partition.
Type in:
create partition primary
f. Select the partition.
Type in:
select partition 1
g. Activate the partition on the disk.
Type in:
active
h. Do a full format into NTFS.
Type in:
format fs=ntfs
It will take some time to complete. Anywhere from 30 minutes up to several hours, depending on the size of the disk.
thanks again to the person who posted this solution as I was able to format my IDE disk and install windows 7.
