Tractor

Hi

My Dad's laptop has a seriously fundamental problem that the crappy factory system restore disk will not solve. Its running XP, and the operating system is included on one of those annoying proprietary back-up disks with other bundled software, so is designed to just restore without re-formatting the drive.

So, can i reformat from an MS-Dos disk on an XP/NTFS machine? If so how? Some of the normal dos commands don't seem to work.

Any help VERY gratefully appreciated...

Mike

lightning101

All you need is a copy of Windows XP, then go to bios, set boot sequence to:

CDROM
IDE0


then allow computer to boot from windows XP cd. Then when booted it will show the partitioned hard drive, tell it you want to put windows on this partition, next option is to format - just pick Quick format, then leave it to the rest of the install.

Next extract compaq drivers from restore CD and put in directory in windows.

DONE.

Tractor

Probelm is I have no XP CD that I can use. My system uses XP Pro, and his is XP Home. His version of XP is on that restore disk, along with all the other rubbish, and booting from that CD gives no option other than just to overwrite the prev. installation, rather than formatting first.

Is there any way in xp i can fromat from an MS-boot disk?

lightning101

OK - you need either EFDISK, OR AEFDISK, the allow you to partition and format in NTFS, free versions are available if you GOOGLE for them.

Tractor

Thanks a lot, will have a search.

lightning101

http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm


this has some useful progs as well.

Tractor

Ta for the help. Turned out the hard drive is fooked I think.

bladerider

Which laptop do you have?

I have the factory installation version (not restore disk) of Win XPpro for Compaq, on a set of three CD's. It's suitable for the Armada and Evo (enterprise edition) series of laptops.

Tractor

Its a Presario 400 Balderider. But I'm pretty sure now its an HD problem.

Ta

suba

if it's HDD problem, you might want to find out what HDD it is and goto the manufacturer website to download some diagnostic software to check it out.

lightning101

Also nearly all Hard Drives come with a 3 Year Warranty.