Reinstall XP on messed up hard drive

rkoenn

Senior member
Aug 4, 2000
433
6
81
I have done all kinds of XP work but am stumped by a current problem. A friend had a surge strike that killed the PS and MB. I thought I would have problems fixing it and I do. The old system was a SIS chipset, the new is an integrated NVidia. Of course there is a major hardware problem. It crashes and reboots when attempting to boot. I tried to install over the existing XP, which I have done like this successfully, but it knows there is another OS on the machine but doesn't allow for a repair install. Is there some way to force an install ontop of the existing installation? I can remove the drive and recover the data but then the guy would have to start again from scratch. Any suggestions are appreciated.
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
8,808
0
0
It crashes and reboots when attempting to boot. I tried to install over the existing XP, which I have done like this successfully, but it knows there is another OS on the machine but doesn't allow for a repair install. Is there some way to force an install ontop of the existing installation?

When you go to install XP, if it sees an existing installation it should ask if you want to install over it (a "repair install") or reformat. If it's not allowing a repair install the OS on there may be corrupted in some way.

Also, your sig is all screwy. You don't use HTML code directly in Fusetalk; links are " [ L = <link text> ] <hyperlink> [ /L ] " (without the spaces).