Problem With Reformatting

[ashasarala]

Hello. I tried reformatting my laptop. It's a Toshiba, Windows XP. It came with three discs. I put the first one in and it seemed to be doing the job. I left the room for a minute. When I came back, my laptop was off! I turned it on again and the c.d. tried to start the whole process over again. I put in the second disc and it said that there was a failure of some sort... So I put the first disc back in. I clicked on "abort" because I was going to try something different. It was a big mistake because now, when I put any of the discs in, or even if I don't do anything at all, I get a black screen with a cursor. None of the c.d.s seem to be doing anything at all. Does anyone have any idea what I could do to fix this?

 

[fishhookz]

Yes, I'd look up the users manual or download it from their site. Also, their utilities.

 

[3vilc]

prehaps try an ordinary win98/95/dos boot disk and see if this works.
if the laptop has no floppy drive you could make a 'bootdisk' on a cd using nero.
dont use windows cd's as these will load straight into setup and not give you a command prompt.
if it boots ok using this method you can run XP setup manually by changing to your cd drive (probably one letter above where it usually is if using a win98 bootdisk as this loads a ramdrive where your cdrom usually is, ie. if your cdrom is usually d: in windows it will be e: from a win98 startup disk), and then type the command 'i386\winnt.exe' this will install the base system and install files to the hard drive and format it if nessecary, then you reboot when promted and it will run the normal xp setup from the hard drive.

hope this is helpful

Clive