home -> pro upgrade, loops during setup

[Mike Williams]

I had a perfectly fine XP Home installation on a new Compaq desktop. I am
attempting to upgrade to XP Professional, using a disc and codes given me
by the techs at my office. It seemed to go OK, but setup didn't complete
and now it's in a loop. The bios loads, and windows starts to load. I get
three scans of the progress bar, the screen goes black and a dos-type
message flashes so quickly I can't read it, and it reboots, and etc etc.

I tried forcing the system to boot from the CD drive, and it re-ran the
setup program, and then tried to reboot and re-run the setup program again.
I let the setup program run this way completely and on the reboot set it to
boot from the hard drive, and got back into the same loop described above.
I tried booting into Safe mode, and got a message saying "setup can't run
in Safe mode."

I thought about going back to Home, but discovered that this bloody new
system didn't come with the OS disc.

Any suggestions or insight would be GREATLY appreciated.

THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU

 

[Guest]

Just a possible solution

If the system came with windows xp home preinstalled, you are saved

Compaq uses a space in a hidden partition.
This is called the "recovery partition"
To use it, when you see the red compaq logo at startup, press f10 and that
will lead you to the Compaq System Recovery.
Follow instructions on the screen. Good Luck
For help, go to www.hp.com/support
then type the model number in the search box
(eg:sr1112nx)
and go to solve a problem.

After you solved the problem, go to the compaq recovery disc creator and
create recovery. Store them in a safe place just in case.

 

[Mike Williams]

Thanks for the suggestion. I've seen that partition. Got past the problem
another way though.
I somehow made the right prompt choices to get the XP Pro disc to run a
complete install (not an upgrade). The bottom line was I had to clean up
the user profiles and reinstall a number of applications, but it went
eventually.
Now, I wonder what's on that "recovery" partition.

 

[Malke]

Thanks for the suggestion. I've seen that partition. Got past the
problem another way though.
I somehow made the right prompt choices to get the XP Pro disc to run
a
complete install (not an upgrade). The bottom line was I had to clean
up the user profiles and reinstall a number of applications, but it
went eventually.
Now, I wonder what's on that "recovery" partition.

The recovery partition has the image(s) of the factory-installed
operating system, which in your case would be XP Home.

Malke