This is really odd. I was trying to help a friend reformat his old laptop so he could give it to his grandparents as a low end PC for web browsing and emailing. Everytime we try to reformat--in safe mode, diagnostic mode or regular mode--it tells us that the disc is busy and cannot reformat . Google wasn't much help--I found a lot of stuff about reformating with multiple partitions but nothing seemed really applicable since there's only one partition on his hard drive, only one OS installed, etc.
we tried just booting from disc but it won't do that; I get a very strange message when I try (I didn't think to write it down).