XP install

[terryco]

I am hoping someone can help me with a problem. A friend has an Acer 5720 laptop that had Vista installed and wanted XP instead. I formatted the C drive and installed a copy of XP and all seemed to install ok. When the laptop restarted It got stuck in a loop asking do i want to start in safe mode or nomal ect. I tried reinstalling the disc and its still the same. I tried a different XP disc and it stated there are no harddrives present press f3 to quit. I pressed alt and f10 to restore to factory settings but are still stuck in the loop. No matter what i try safemode or previous settings that worked i cannot start windows. The XP screen starts and then returns to the loop. I would be thankfull for any help.

 

[jansonwong]

Here are some nice tips and tools for you to repair your Windows system.




[mucks' edit]

 

[muckshifter]

http://support.acer.com/

 

[terryco]

Cheers for the help. I managed to get the disc that came with the laptop this morning and got Vista back. My mate still wants Xp and i'm not sure if i want to go through with all that again. Unless I did wrong all i did was install XP from a pukka disk. It asked do i want to install on one of two partitions, i chose C as the other partition had a small amount of files i thought that would be my get out of jail card if all went pearshape. I thought it would be the original files so i could revert back to factory settings, but i was wrong.

 

[muckshifter]

A lot of these "laptops" tie you in to the OS that is installed, and, don't give you any proper DVDs but have a hidden partition, you don't really want to delete that, they use it to restore the original OS.

To install XP, and all Windows since, one normally pops the CD/DVD into the drive & boots to that drive using the CD/DVD to "clean" install the OS

http://www.theeldergeek.com/clean_installation_of_windows_xp.htm

To "roll-back" to XP, however, one would recommend a real XP CD, one with a licence.