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HELP! Can't install XP on laptop

A

ACWingit

Member
I have a Medion laptop (Best Buy's brand). It was running Win XP home.

Today it announced "No operating system found" when I turned it on.
I tried rebooting several times, no dice, no operating system.

I took the CD that came with the laptop and followed the instructions for system recovery. None worked. The final step was a complete reinstall and revert back to factory settings. So I tried that. It warned me a couple times that all data would be erased. I told it ok. And then it cleared the screen and nothing happened. I waited and waited and waited. Gave up.

Tried again....this time I told it to reformat the drive, which it did.
Then it copied all the OS files (just like it's supposed to).
then it announced that it had to reboot to finish the install
So it did.
and promptly attempted to re-install windows all over again.

I've tried this 6 times. Each time the install goes EXACTLY as it's supposed to. Until it reboots. And then it just brings me right back to the windows install menu where I started. If I take the CD out and try to reboot I get No operating system found.

It's as if it spent all that time copying stuff into nowhere.

I've run a disk test on the hard drive and found no errors.

I thought perhaps the disk that came with the notebook was bad. So I took another copy of Win XP that I have and attempted to install that one.
It did the exact same thing - went thru the entire install process, rebooted and then wanted to install windows all over again.

It never finishes the install and it never boots into windows!

I am totally at a loss.
Any ideas are welcome.
Thanks!

 
well my first guess would have been the hard drive, is there any way you can try a new hard drive in there? otherwise some other wild guesses would be possibly memory? run a memory check? otherwise, i was getting similar problems on my desktop when my powersupply was going bad, but thats a stretch in that case.
 
What disk test did you run? Boot from the CD and enter the Recovery Console and run the command CHKDSK /R
 
Can't run the recovery console. It wants me to enter an administrator password. I don't have one. It refuses to let me in. 🙁

I ran the ibm disk test (that you can download off their site). As best I can tell, the drive in the laptop is an IBM. It has a couple of tests - a quick one and a more thorough one. I ran both. Both came out clean.

and I can't replace the hardrive at this time for 2 reasons - first I don't have another I can use and second I'll void the warranty.

I have the option of taking it in for repair but that means I won't get it back for a few weeks and I really needed it next week for the holidays so I'd like to try to fix it myself. :
 
Try getting something like a Linux System Rescue CD and see if you can do anything with that. Better yet, try installing some other OS on the laptop and see if that works. You might also have a bad sector 0 causing problems, in which case you could try using the Linux SystemRescueCD to create a small 8 MB partition at the front and set that to hidden, then install XP to the remainder of the disk. Something along those lines. 🙂

http://www.sysresccd.org/
 
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