Ok, my friend got a virus which killed his computer. (It wouldn't boot up past the "WINDOWS XP" logo.

He gave it to me to format and put windows 7 on.

I TRIED this... but it just won't work! It installs fine, then freezes at the windows 7 logo on its FIRST boot.
Kubuntu 8.10 gets past its logo and then the screen blanks out, never to return. (Even when you use the live cd!)
GParted does all its loading text then the screen goes blank too.

What am I to do?Its a Toshiba Satellite M40I just tried Kubuntu again and I got a green screen for a few seconds, then a flashing CURSOR, then the Kubuntu mouse cursor, then a light blue/black screen with nothing on it.

Very odd.Okay, i finally got gparted going and reformatted it. However, there is a small problem - the 80gb HDD is only showing up as 57gb. Any ideas? May be a hidden restore partition.

Try holding the zero KEY at boot to see if a factory restore function comes up?I tried that with no success. After talking to my friend he said there is a recovery partition, but Gparted is not picking it up. The first win7 install I did picked it up but no further ones (i did it four times) have picked it up. Is it possible the virus is still resident and is blocking Gparted etc from seeing the partition?I think i've solved the virus problem. D/loaded Darik's Boot and Nuke 1.0.7

Currently wiping and zeroing the entire HDD, killing all partitions and any remnant virus that is still lurking.

If it doesn't work past this then I know that its a hardware problem, not a virus problem.