DescentBB

Got a replacement HD for daughters lap top and installed it. Bios sees the HD and when I put the winxp disk in, it shows to be copying files. Gets to where it says "starting windows" and nothing happens. We let it sit there for a good 20 minutes and nothing happens. I tried formatting drive but only way I could get comp to see "C" drive was by using a old western digital support disk (New HD is a Toshiba). Even then I tried FDISK and format c: command but they were not recognized. Any ideas what I should be doing?

Is the new driver bigger?

The first thing that pops into my head is BIOS HD size support limitations. I'd check to see if you have the latest BIOS firmware, and see what's in the documentation about hard drive size limitations on the BIOS's part.

If you want to try again starting *really* fresh, I'd boot into a linux live distro & do, with your new drive installed (and the old drive nowhere close to the machine):
That'll literally write zeros to the entire drive.

Have you tried deleting the partition and recreating the partition then formatting? WinXp CD will allow you to do that.

are you using the CDs that came with the laptop?

snoopy wrote:Is the new driver bigger?

The first thing that pops into my head is BIOS HD size support limitations. I'd check to see if you have the latest BIOS firmware

x2

I once had this exact problem and it was fixed by updating the bios.

Thanks for replies.

Snoopy / Isaac... First off new hardrive is same size and speed of old drive ( 500 gb, 7200rpm) so bios "should" not be a problem ( tho it it the most simplistic bios when compared to the Asus mb in my comp).

Flip....No Cd's that came with lap top as my daughter seems to have misplaced (read lost) the disks.

Heretic...Like I posted, when I put win disk in it starts automatically loading basic file. No choice to partition as windows hangs at "starting". If I remember right, you have to be in windows before you can partition. Also no choices when disk starts up, just starts loading the files

Since Windows XP, did you make sure to disable AHCI in the BIOS?

AHCI wouldn't make it hang at that stage, it would just make it so setup couldn't see the hard drive (unless you used the F6 floppy to load the AHCI driver).

You use gparted to delete the partiton and create a new partition. You can get it in most boot cds.

From my experience, most hangs in the early stages of a Windows installation mean that it can't find drivers to interface with some piece of hardware. If you can get the disc (or image) specifically for that machine, you might have more success.

P.S. The "loading files" progressbar at the beginning isn't doing anything on the drive, it's doing everything in memory.

Well I could get into the Vdrive. Drive is labeled as the C: drive. If I do a C: dir\ command the Vdrive is listed with 113,664 byte free. Anything I can do from here?

you need a install cd of XP with SP3 on it.

the disk I have has sp-1

Well I guess I'll never understand software. After all this head bashing, I inserted the win 7 upgrade disk I bought for my comp, into the laptop and yup....you guessed it. Win 7 loaded and got it to connect to wireless connect and is downloading sp upgrades. Guess I'm flummoxed as the win 7 is a upgrade and supposedly needs win xp to load over. The win xp I tried was a stand alone product.The only problem I had was win 7 did not accept the product key number that came with it. Yet it still completed loading. Any ideas why?

it worked because it has the drivers your kid's laptop needs.

there are instructions on the internet to make a xp disc that has sp3 on it.

woodchip, it might not be accepting your key because you did it as a full install instead of a upgrade.

And the process of getting SP3 on a disc is called slipstreaming. Try this: http://lifehacker.com/386526/slipstream ... llation-cd

Regarding the product ID, since it was a previous installed win 7, might there still be the original ID from ASUS locked in the virtual memory/bios?

No, but what you can do is install Win7 again using that upgrade disc/key. Since it can see that there was a previous Windows installation (the 'trial' you just installed), it will treat it as a legitimate upgrade.