- Jun 7, 2000
- 9,099
- 19
- 81
I happened to be talking to a friend of mine last night on the phone, when her son ran in the room to tell her that his computer wouldn't start up. Since it was already 1:30, she didn't want to invest too much time into it last night, but she asked me if I would help her out with troubleshooting it / fixing it over the phone (because she lives in Chicago, and I'm in Columbus).
Her son said that his most recent activity on the computer had been browsing the internet, and then he downloaded (and I assume installed) something from "an official microsoft site for java". I don't know if the computer rebooted itself, or what, but it won't start back up now - it just says "Unable to load Operating System". This is a Dell... no idea what model, I was too tired to think clearly enough to ask. I stepped her through changing to the appropriate boot order, and got her into Windows installation by booting from the windows CD. At that point, I hung up, because she's able to figure most things out, and I thought she could take it from there.
A few minutes later, I get an IM saying that it asked her which partition to install windows on - she saw a 32 MB partition, and a "huge" partition. She chose the large one. She said that the install program worked for a brief while, and then halted with an error message saying "an error has occured and cannot continue the installation process, press F3 to exit".
Because I've never seen this specific problem before, I'm assuming that the partition is somehow screwed up, or that there are corrupted files on the partition that are preventing Windows from reinstalling, and that the next logical step would be to delete the large partition, recreate it, reformat it, and then attempt to reinstall Windows onto it. Anyone care to agree/disagree with that? Any suggestions for an alternate "next-step"?
Thx.
Her son said that his most recent activity on the computer had been browsing the internet, and then he downloaded (and I assume installed) something from "an official microsoft site for java". I don't know if the computer rebooted itself, or what, but it won't start back up now - it just says "Unable to load Operating System". This is a Dell... no idea what model, I was too tired to think clearly enough to ask. I stepped her through changing to the appropriate boot order, and got her into Windows installation by booting from the windows CD. At that point, I hung up, because she's able to figure most things out, and I thought she could take it from there.
A few minutes later, I get an IM saying that it asked her which partition to install windows on - she saw a 32 MB partition, and a "huge" partition. She chose the large one. She said that the install program worked for a brief while, and then halted with an error message saying "an error has occured and cannot continue the installation process, press F3 to exit".
Because I've never seen this specific problem before, I'm assuming that the partition is somehow screwed up, or that there are corrupted files on the partition that are preventing Windows from reinstalling, and that the next logical step would be to delete the large partition, recreate it, reformat it, and then attempt to reinstall Windows onto it. Anyone care to agree/disagree with that? Any suggestions for an alternate "next-step"?
Thx.
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