Power loss during Windows XP installation

[samir420]

Hi! I had a Portuguese version of Windows XP and last night I was
installing the English version. It said it would have to do a full
installation, like, deleting all the files on my computer and stuff...
During the installation I lost power here at my house and the computer
obviously turned off. Now I can't install it anymore, and I can't
access my hard drive at all. I changed the order on the BOOT so it
would access my CD drive first, but nothing happens. It keeps reading
the CD forever but the screen stays black and doesn't change. I also
tried creating a DOS BOOT DISKETTE on another computer I have and then
when i try to go to c: it says "Invalid drive specification". Can
anybody help me please? I would really appreciate it! Thank you very
much..

Samir

 

[JS]

Your C drive is probably corrupted due to the power loss. If you know the
manufacture of the drive you can download one or more of their hard drive
utilities that may fix the problem. Also a quick fix might be to boot from
the floppy and at the prompt enter: fdisk /mbr

JS

 

[LVTravel]

Sounds like you may have fried the hard drive or motherboard, however, a
standard DOS boot disk won't access a NTFS formatted disk drive and will
give you that message also.

What shows up in the bios when you first boot the computer? If the drive is
showing up in the bios but the computer isn't accessing it, find a boot disk
that has the dos program fdisk on it. Run that program and see if the drive
shows as a non-DOS partition. If so, delete the partition and reattempt to
install from the CD.

What is the make and model of the computer you are using, along with the
motherboard and bios particulars? Which version of XP are you attempting to
install (OEM, Pro, Home, etc.)? This will help us to help you in future
messages.

 

[Glen]

You say you can't now boot off the XP CD? What actually happens. Even if a
failed install occurred you should still be able to boot off the CD and
either finish the install or delete everything and start again. Do you have
any other CDs you can boot from just to test the mechanism. Can you test the
XP CD in another computer to see if you can boot from it.