Error while formatting

I just was given a Lenovo 3000 laptop. I ran it for a few days to make sure it worked ok and it did. My plans were to format and donate it.
I went into the bios ( which has a built in HDD user password, which I have but can't seem to remove from startup) and put the DVD drive 1st in boot order and hard drive 2nd. I put in the Vista home premium disk, booted up and keyed into boot from cd. It begins to load and about 5 minutes in it stops and gives me " Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer." The error # is 0xc00000e9.
It seems this error code happens for a varity of reasons and I found a lot of different online cures but all require that I get farther than I can.
If I start Windows normally it starts up just fine. I just can't format without it freezing up and giving me the error.

Can anyone be of help here???
George

Hello George and welcome to the forums

If you're going to donate it, then I would suggest completely wiping the hard drive to ensure that no personal details remain on the disk. The normal Windows format still leaves a lot of remnants on the disk that could easily be recovered if someone knows what they're doing. There's all sorts of techniques that could be use, if you're interested then take a look here:

Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory

Wipe the disk with DBAN:

About DBAN | Darik's Boot And Nuke

The standard it wipes a disk to is acceptable for government authorities use

Tom