Unable to Boot UP XP Home

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
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G

Guest

Hi There,

I have a Compaq P4 Laptop, I reformatted the hard drive and using partition
magic I created drives D to G and placed my XP Home operating system on the D
drive, this has worked perfectly for almost a year now until recently, I had
to create a C drive to install a programme that automatically defaulted
there, there was no user option to place it anywhere else, again everything
worked OK.
Now my laptop sometimes fails to find the operating system on start up,
eventually it will boot up after numerous restarts. I have removed the C
drive and the programme but the problem still exists, I have again created a
C drive to try and reinstall the OS there but I can`t do that as it states
the version I am trying to load is older (which is SP1) than the installed
version (SP2 downloaded).
I have tried booting from the CD direct but that does not work either.
I have an external USB hard drive that I have copied the original drives to
except for the D drive as some files are not able to be copied.

Can anyone suggest a remedy either through partition magic or otherwise, I
am not a techie guy but I can follow most instructions if not in techie mode.
 
Just a suggestion, Ted,

Use Partition Magic to delete all partitions and start from scratch.
Create a 10 GB partition on C drive to install your operating system on.
in your BIOS be sure the CD drive boots before the hard drive does.

Install XP on C: drive that is formatted in NTFS.
After the installation is complete, then go back in with Partition Magic to
create other partitions.

Good Luck,
 
Ted said:
Hi There,

I have a Compaq P4 Laptop, I reformatted the hard drive and using partition
magic I created drives D to G and placed my XP Home operating system on the D
drive, this has worked perfectly for almost a year now until recently, I had
to create a C drive to install a programme that automatically defaulted
there, there was no user option to place it anywhere else, again everything
worked OK.
Now my laptop sometimes fails to find the operating system on start up,
eventually it will boot up after numerous restarts. I have removed the C
drive and the programme but the problem still exists, I have again created a
C drive to try and reinstall the OS there but I can`t do that as it states
the version I am trying to load is older (which is SP1) than the installed
version (SP2 downloaded).
I have tried booting from the CD direct but that does not work either.
I have an external USB hard drive that I have copied the original drives to
except for the D drive as some files are not able to be copied.

Can anyone suggest a remedy either through partition magic or otherwise, I
am not a techie guy but I can follow most instructions if not in techie mode.
Click to expand...

The intermittent nature of your problem is of concern. It
suggests that one of your drives might have a physical problem.
As a first step I would boot the machine from a floppy disk
for a while, to see if the problem persists. Here is how you
can make one:
- Launch WinXP.
- Format a floppy disk.
- Start a Command Prompt (Start / Run / cmd {OK}).
- Type these commands:
xcopy /h c:\boot.ini a:\ {Enter}
xcopy /h c:\nt*.* a:\ {Enter}

Let's hear how you go!
 
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