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Thread: Severe Laptop Issues

  1. 6th December 2006, 10:26 AM #1
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    Severe Laptop Issues

    Bought a new laptop last a bit over a week ago. It came with XP Home so yesterday morning was upgrading to XP Pro and half way through the upgrade Marcos turned it off.

    After this it wouldnt boot at all, just kept coming up with an error message saying a file wasnt missing, each time you tried the file name changed. It is a Compaq notebook, it doesnt come with boot discs because there is a separate partition on the hard drive that it restores from in the event of a failure. After the event a third partition which was 8mb appeared, we have managed to get rid of it as its not supposed to be there. We are now back to the original two partitions, the main hard drive and the back up one. Problem is the drive letters have been reasigned. The main one is now D instead of C drive and the other is C instead of D. We need to boot from the main one and reinstall windows but it wont let us because the computer thinks the C drive is the D drive if you follow. Dad has a tool for swapping the names of the drives but it appears the computer is swapping them back.

    I am begining to panic and Marcos' life is in danger. Please help. Matt
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  2. 6th December 2006, 10:50 AM #2
    Wazza Guest
    Go into Bios setup and reassign the drive names

    Then see how you go from there
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  3. 6th December 2006, 11:10 AM #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by Wazza
    Go into Bios setup and reassign the drive names

    Then see how you go from there
    Dad has done that but it changed the names back from what he said. Matt
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  4. 6th December 2006, 12:29 PM #4
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    Weren't you upgrading from xp home to xp pro? If so, why don't you just boot from cd and do repair install?

    Cheers
    Simon.
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  5. 6th December 2006, 01:00 PM #5
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    Either boot from the CD as stated above, or change the boot options in the bios - you should have an option to boot from

    CD Rom
    HDD 1
    HDD 2 etc.,
    FDD

    Choose the one where the OS/backup is on.

    Or boot from CD, then stop the install ending back up at C prompt - then do a new clean install from DOS

    Ladas
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  6. 6th December 2006, 01:02 PM #6
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    Or just interupt the boot sequence (press F10, F8, Esc or Del Key - can't recall which)

    I'll try mine and confirm
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  7. 6th December 2006, 01:14 PM #7
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    Press and hold the F8 key then switch on - you will have several options for booting - boot in C prompt safe or otherwise, with CD support - then new install from CD
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  8. 6th December 2006, 01:16 PM #8
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    I'll let dad explain-

    It boots from CD. It swaps the drives C to D so that C is the "recovery" partition. When you swap them back it reverts on the next reboot. C becomes the active partition. When you make D active it still fails to boot.

    I suspect the problem is in the BIOS. It has a feature where F11 activates the recovery drive. Running setup to install XP pro fails totally at the last step. I suspect that something is preventing it from writing to the boot sector but there is nothing in thhe BIOS to change this!

    Big Ace
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  9. 6th December 2006, 01:42 PM #9
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    The Pro version of Win XP you have - is it a full install - or an upgrade version ?
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  10. 6th December 2006, 01:49 PM #10
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    sounds more like an MBR fault or partitioning fault to me....

    hope youve got a recovery cdrom, this will work but not if your relying on a HD partition based Recovery system...

    burn yourself a cdrom that is bootable and has Fdisk, partionmagic or nortons Disk doctor on in versions that are command prompt friendly...(Heretoafter refered to as partitioning CD or CDp for short)

    grab hold of your recovery cdrom

    boot that cdrom, then manually delete all partitions...
    shut down the system, count to 30 and reboot on the CDp
    repartition the drive, I recommend spilting it into 3 parts

    1. 10gb for the actual software, (windows, office, browesers etc)
    2. x gb to be the dedicated swapfile drive for windows (mines set at 5 but this part also doubles as a temp file drive)
    3. whatevers left for installing games and storing data

    shut down, count to 30 and reboot on CDP.
    confirm your partitions are where you want them and set the first partition to bootable.
    shutdown, count to 30 and reboot on the windows installer/recovery cdrom.

    best of luck
    Dave

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