Installing XP on laptop. 1

[bravura]

Hi,

My friends laptop was running win98 and then upgraded to XP successfully. After a few week of having this on his laptop XP crashed with a message saying it shut down to protect his computer and asking him to restart and run chkdsk.

After restarting windows it would not load up but dispayed this message insted everytime. We then booted it from the cd and went into repair mode which failed and left us at the prompt. After running chkdsk it returned saying there was a problem in the volume of C:. My friend decided to format this drive inorder to reinstall XP. When we went into the install option after booting from the cd it failed.

I dont know what to do as i have practically no experience on this os. Please Help if you can.

Thanks in advance.

 

[pca2]

From your description it looks like a problem in your friends Hard Drive.

Can he install any other OS?

 

[bravura]

Firstly thanks for replying!

We havent tried installing any other OS cause at d moment XP is d only 1 available to us.(We are away from home in college) We were going to buy a new hard disk for it next week but in the meantime i taught i would post the problem up just in case there was an easier soution.

 

[wolluf]

Does sound like hard drive problem. Have you got a win98 boot floppy to hand (has laptop got a floppy drive?) - can get one from

http://www.bootdisk.com

if not. Try booting with it & use fdisk - see what it thinks is on the drive (if it can access it at all) & if it can, remove any partitions it finds and create a new one & format it (after reboot). If you can do this, try the XP install CD again.

 

[T07]

I had exactly this problem - Virus.

Clean reinstall was the only way I could fix it.

 

[Bobg1]

It could also be a corrupt MBR (master boot record)

 

[mykp]

Sounds like a HD prob or the master boot record

Try this

Boot off a floppy or the xp cd

Get to the dos prompt

Type in fixmbr (Try this if the repair fails)

If you use the xp cd then you can select repair an installation, its the same thing.

If the fixmbr or repair install doesnt work then there is either a problem with the HD or you have a virus.

Let me know how you go on.