Ian said:
Hi Malke,
Apologies about the bad post, new to all this stuff. Some more details
that may help:
AMD 2600+ CPU
80GB Hardrive
Not sure about the video card.
Windows XP Home SP2 (OEM)
I was playing with a hard disk manager (out of interest to see what it
did) and by shear idiotry appear to have wiped all my hard drive of
data, rather than cleaning up unused space. Not quite sure what I did
really (luckily I have almost everything important backed up on CD as
I don't have much data on my computer really, I have only had it since
February)
Anyway, on re-start the computer was asking for a boot disk and not
doing much else. This I figured meant I'd wiped everything. I found
the original Windows XP Home SP2 CD that came with the computer (I
guess this is OEM re-installation material).
I put this in and "pressed any key" when prompted. It quite merrily
began re-formatting the disk as expected. As it was taking a while I
was looking for the Product Key number which the small setup manual
said I would need. While looking over the back of my computer to see
where the sticker was, I turned it off at the little black switch by
accident, half way through the re-formatting process!!!!
I then re-loaded the installation CD. This time I got an error that I
can’t quite remember (sorry!). After a quick web search I found
reference to a simliar fault, something do do with the harddisk
format. Using the BIOS?, I disabled "LBA mode" in the harddisk set up.
(The thread I had followed said set it to CHS instead of LBA but I
didn’t have a CHS option).
I re-started the installation and it re-formated the disk and
installed all the installation files no problem...…but then on the
restart, instead of getting the Setup GUI I got "set up is inspecting
your hardware configuration", then followed by a blank screen. (When
it restarted, the installation CD was still in the drive, not sure if
this matters)
Now a) I just get ablank screen when I should get the Windows XP set
up GUI
b) I don’t seem to be able to re-format the disk and re-install
the
installation files.
Basically a tale from someone who knows little about computers and
meddled too soon
Yes. I'm afraid so. I'm not sure what "the little black switch" was, but
put it back the way it was when you got it. Then go back into the BIOS
and enable LBA. Make sure the boot order is set to boot the cd drive
first, hard drive second.
Now go to the hard drive mftr.'s website and download a diagnostic
utility. You will make either a bootable cd or floppy with the file you
download. If you want to make the bootable cd, you'll need third-party
burning software since XP's built-in burner won't burn .iso's. If you
don't have third-party burning software, a good free one is here:
http://www.cdburnerxp.se/ - CDBurnerXP Pro
So, go ahead and create your diagnostic bootable media and boot with it.
Do a thorough test of the hard drive. If the drive tests good (and we
are doing this to make sure you didn't fry something when you hit "the
little black switch") then try the install again.
This time, make sure you delete the current partition(s), create new
one(s), and format the drive NTFS. You can do a quick format. If you
get any error messages, write them down and include the exact text in
your next post.
Refer to these links for help in installing XP:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html - Clean Install How-To
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#reinstall_Windows - What
you need to have on hand
Malke
