HELP! I've "bricked" my laptop! (windows won't boot)

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petedee

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Hey all, hope that you can help me out here.

I've being having alot of problems with my laptop recently with spyware and all that stuff I inherited from its previous owner (my gf) so i figured that it might be better just to trash everything and start again, unfortunatly my gf has managed to lose all of the CDs that came with the machine. However i managed to get a XP from my uni (Thanks MSDNAA) and got around to installing windows XP Pro.

Now I was able to boot onto the CD, i formatted the drive and put all of the partions 3 in all into one large 80 gig drive, setup copied all of the setup files onto the drive, i rebooted to get around the proper part of the instillation, however it has never got any further than that, if i boot without a windows CD in then it just hangs with a flashing _ looking like its waiting for some instructions or something, if i boot with a windows CD installed I can't get back to the setup process because the phrase "setup is inspecting your hardware configuration" pops up, disappears and then it hangs there. The system still responds to CTRL + ALT + DEL but it just keeps hanging in the same place. The machine is an ADVENT 7066M please help!

EDIT: Should just add that the machines doesn't have a floppy drive so booting from a win98 floppy disc is out of the question, i don't actually have a CDRW drive here either, although i could get one if its the only way to fix it.
 
xp from my uni ? What's an Uni?

I assume uncle.... and I also assume it is not a legal copy.
You need to purchase a legal copy of XP.
 
heh, no uni mean university, think college for all you american folkes.

And it is a legal copy of windows, I can get free software from microsoft because I'm a student
 
heh heh - gotta speak universal here. Us yanks don't always get the slang!

we call it college or university.... in any case where we go to get "ed-ju-ma-kated."

"Yesturday I cudn't spel gradeate, today I r one."
 
Now I was able to boot onto the CD, i formatted the drive and put all of the partions 3 in all into one large 80 gig drive, setup copied all of the setup files onto the drive, i rebooted to get around the proper part of the instillation,

hmmm why exactly did you reboot during the process? if you booted off the CD partitioned and formatted then told XP which partition you wanted to install XP on then rebooting would halt the process.
 
When you reformat you can't contiune straight through the process, windows needs a restart to start the setup process proper (as in the part when you get control of your mouse back and where you set your local settings)
 
yes I understand when WINDOWS reboots itself ( which does not occur until the installation process is allready in progress). but the way you posted it appears that YOU manually rebooted.
 
sounds like you need a bootable utilitys cd
if you can try to get the ultimate boot cd I think its free.
should have app to reformat hdd and you can then start over and don't manually reboot when xp is saying its rebooting.
you should be able to go from reformat all the way to where it asks for key without manual interference
in your case you may not even need a key.
I have not used it myself.
 
Samstoned said:
sounds like you need a bootable utilitys cd
if you can try to get the ultimate boot cd I think its free.
should have app to reformat hdd and you can then start over and don't manually reboot when xp is saying its rebooting.
you should be able to go from reformat all the way to where it asks for key without manual interference
in your case you may not even need a key.
I have not used it myself.

Cheers matey, I grabbed to ulitmate boot CD and formatted it from there, then i could just boot straight from the windows CD, a bit of a mess around but its all working now! Only problem is my wifi still won't connect to our campus network :confused:
 
start a n'other thread or post it under networking
it will get lost very fast here.
I don't do wirelss
 
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