Mana Banana wrote:
>Hello All! I'm going through hell with a laptop...having all sorts of
>problems getting it to boot up. I hope my friend will learn never to
>take a computer for payment again, lol.
>
>Soo..Computer starts out Loading pretty much normally. Then I get 2
>error messages, letting me know that the DLLs are not loading
>correctly, and the only on is to restart. This cycle just continues.
>I contacted HP (this is an HP Pavilion N5135) and they told me I need
>to use my restore disc to completely restore windows, and that's the
>only way to repair the laptop. Okay...that wouldn't be so bad, but
>as this is a second hand computer, my friend doesn't have a restore
>disc. I told the man at HP that, and he told me that I could use an
>XP disc from any computer, or just buy a restore disc from Microsoft.
>I guess he was getting his info from a bad source, because as far as
>I can see, Microsoft doesn't sell anything less than the full version
>of windows XP, which is $200, which she can't afford. Also, every
>person I know that has bought a new computer recently has Vista, and
>anyway, from what I'm reading, you can't use a restore disc from
>another computer. Soo....This leads to my actual question....
>
>Where in the world can you buy a restore disc? Or even can you? I
>REALLY don't want to tell her that she has to spend $200 to buy
>Windows anew...please, give me some semblance of hope??
>
>Thanks!!
I ran into a similar problem with an Averatec C3500 convertible a few
months ago. You can not buy at any price a WindowsXP Tablet Edition
disk. The WindowsXPte is tablet specific and tablet manufactures supply
you with a system restore disk which is just an 'image'. It was very
frustrating. I ended up with a solution that worked. This is what I did;
1) Pull the drive from the N5135 and mount it in an external case.
2) Get a WindowsXP CD and copy all the files to a temp directory.
3) Copy the I386 directory from off of the N5135 hard disk to the same
temp directory. Note that it will want to over-write the existing files
when necessary. You want it to do this so tell it yes.
4) look on the N5135 hard disk for directories that contain computer
specific hardware drivers. (Some companies like HP are nice and will
put them in all in one directory with a name like 'sw_ver'.
5) Copy that directory to the main directory of your temp directory
6) Using a program like ISO-Buster, make extract the 'boot image' on
the WindowsXP CD that is in your CDROM drive and place it in the root
of your temp directory.
7) Use an application like Folder2ISO and make your temp directory into
an ISO
8) Use an application like BurnCDCC to then burn your ISO to a disk.
note that your ISO burner must be able to burn a multi-mode ISO for
this to work.
Once you have your CD made, make an 'image' copy of the N5135 hard disk
(it never hurts to back up when doing something as drastic as this)
Once all of that is done do the following;
1) put the N5135 hard disk back into the laptop
2) Make sure that the laptop BIOS is set to boot from the CDROM
3) Put the CD you just created into the laptop and boot up
Just a couple of notes;
1) Averatec like most laptop makers, locks the OS to the machine. Which
means that you need the OEM information. That is why you copy the
standard windows disk to your temp directory FIRST. Then you copy over
the OEM information.
2) In some cases, you may need to edit the boot file so that it will
actually look for the OEM inf file. I did not need to do that with the
full retail disk version, but you may have to for other types of
WindowsXP disk
3) In some cases, the inf make be looking for the CD to have a specific
name. If so, when you name the disk, please be sure to use that name or
the disk will not work.
--
Sincerely,
C.Joseph Drayton, Ph.D. AS&T
CSD Computer Services
Web site:
http://csdcs.tlerma.com/
E-mail:
(E-Mail Removed)