I'm stumped on this one. help please.

archie-05

Solid State Member
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I have an issue with a laptop I said I would work on for a friend. First off its in a never ending boot loop, well it boots to a "choose how to load windows" screen (no matter the choice it just reboots to same screen). second when I used his installation disk and try to reinstall I have to choose a partition, but there are non to choose at all then any button I select from this screen takes me straight to the blue screen of death. What I am most confused about is there are no partitions showing up at all. Does this mean he has a bad HD or is there like viral software on here. I'm really confused and am at a freezing point. I appreciate all and any help. :confused:
 
It's possible it's a bad hard drive but I would've thought it's more likely either the registry or another core system file has become corrupted. Have you got SMART enabled for the drive? Have a look in the BIOS and see what it's status is if you have, if it's so far gone you can't see any partitions then it should show up there accordingly. Another way to find out would be to remove the drive, put it in an enclosure, connect it to another PC and then drag the files you need across. You'll probably need to do that anyway since it sounds like your next option would be to reformat and start over!

I'd also recommend grabbing the ultimate boot cd (have a google for it, it's a great disk and everyone should have one lying around!) and booting from that. Once you're in there there's a wealth of tools for checking the health of your hard drive and a lot more besides.
 
Check loose cables first of all, if thats not the problem I'd do as berry120 suggests and try the disk on another machine. I've got a handy HD to USB/adapter so i can connect any HD size to my laptop through USB - very useful.
 
take the hard drive out...look at who makes the hard drive. Go to the manufacturers web site of the hard drive and download their free diag software...burn it to a cd. Most not only have diags, they can completely erase the hard drive.
BTW this copy of windows you are using...is it a "burnt" copy or retail / oem ?
 
The copy of windows is his real copy that came with the laptop. I really appriciate the suggestion and will try them as soon as I can.
 
First make sure it's not setup in the BIOS to boot from anything else but the hard drive.

If that's covered, boot using the Windows XP installation disc and start the Recovery Console.

Run this command:
FIXMBR

You may also want to try:
FIXBOOT

I'd be curious to learn how far into the boot sequence it gets.

Mitch
 
Hard to boot to the CD when you set it to boot only to the hard drive???

I would say boot off the installation CD and do the Recovery Console as well. See if either of those 2 commands work (mitch's). If not and none of the other suggestions have worked either, post back with more details.
 
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