Pulled the HDD, installed it in my desktop, deleted all four partitions, installed one partition, ran chkdsk /r from DOS, reformatted again, everything seems fine.
Installed windows 7 to USB flash drive, I can get the following notifications, depending on what I'm doing:
Failed to format the selected partition. [Error: 0x80070057].
Windows could not format a partition on disk 0. The error occured while preparing the partition for installation. Error code: 0x80070057
Installed HDD back in desktop, installed Windows 7 fine. Upon restart, removed HDD and put back in laptop, try to boot form HDD, get following error:
No bootable device --insert boot disk and press any key
**bleep** is going on? Why will it work in one HP and not another?