Windows XP reinstalling

Hi Guys,

As a newbie to this forum please gimme' a chance to describe my problem.

Rescently a friend asked me to help him with his laptop because it told him it couldn't
start windows xp. It told him that it just couldn't boot and to reboot from the Disk.
so he gave it to me to give it another shot. after finally getting to the installation window from boot from CD and selecting which partition to use it wouldn't work.
it told me it couldn't use it and it might be damaged. I Tried again this time deleting the old partition and creating a new one. but smaller. it nearly worked but it couldn't copy the files from the CD after 4%. any help out there please?

thanks :)
 
Also, could be a problem w/ the optical drive. Depending on the mfg of laptop, it may have hardware diagnostic tools installed. My HP desktop does - under Programs>PC Help & Tools (odd name).

There are free hardware utilities to check basic functions of optical drives.

Also, for the brand or HDD in laptop, get their diagnostic utility to check the HDD. They'll have instructions on burning it to CD as a bootable disk.

Can also clean the optical drive laser lenses w/ a CD / DVD drive cleaning disk - has tiny brushes on it. Find them at lots of stores.

You can test the memory w/ a tool like MemTest86+ (from a boot disk you burn).

If the XP install disk has the "Repair" option when 1st boot the CD, it will take you into Recovery Console (MS has extensive articles on using it). You can run things like chkdsk (though the HDD mfg's disk utility should also have this capability, but won't call it "check disk").
 
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