[Josh_R_32]

Hopefully someone on here knows a thing or 2 about computers, basically I have a laptop and its abit tired, it generally takes 10 mins to load up from 'starting windows' screen then you get about half an hour then it blue screens and restarts. I'm trying to re load a copy of windows xp onto it, the file is on a flash drive, is there any way of installing it without the laptop fully booting? I've tried to burn the file to a disk with my working laptop but when I put the disk into dying lappy it says the disk is blank?

Can anyone shed any light onto the shituation?

Cheers
Josh

 

[Hostile]

Can't you get into the BIOS by pressing one of the F keys and boot from a drive? I'm not sure if it lets you use remove able media, but you can try. Also, what windows are you running, because when you press one of the F keys, you should be able to do a full restore without any disks? You can google it for your make and model, that will just reset it back to factory settings and then create back up disks once you're done?

 

[Josh_R_32]

It's got a daft copy of windows 7 hence why I'm tryin to revert it back, I tried f2 boot from USB FDD and it didn't do anything grr!!!

 

[Josh_R_32]

It then wants to start in repair mode but I've done that before and it took all day and told me the problem cannot be fixed

 

[Josh_R_32]

Now done the f12 boot from DVD and still jumps back to launch windows repair

 

[Silver]

Did you make it bootable?

http://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/

 

[Josh_R_32]

Managed to get it running and it's currently extracting the setup fingers crossed it does something now lol

 

[Ryan-H]

My other suggestion would have been to connect the HDD of said dodgy booting laptop to another working computer using one of these or something similar..

http://www.amazon.co.uk/DIGIFLEX-Drive-Caddy-Enclosure-Laptop/dp/B002UZO07C/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1364839736&sr=8-2

It gives a direct connection to the HDD from the problem laptop and you can use it as a direct viewer to open up the files and folders exactly as you would see them on the laptop itself, but without the booting problems.. It's mainly meant as data recovery hardware for non-bootable systems. (this is why i bought something similar, to recover files)

It will connect directly to the drive via USB and without any other hardware connections which could possibly be interfering.. Plug it into a working laptop, find the drive and format it. Then using the new OS (the one that you want) on your flash drive, copy it onto the plugged in drive, install it and that should replace the old OS with the new one, then once the OS has been successfully installed, re-connect it to the laptop in it's original position and run as normal..

 

[Josh_R_32]

My other suggestion would have been to connect the HDD of said dodgy booting laptop to another working computer using one of these or something similar..

http://www.amazon.co.uk/DIGIFLEX-Drive-Caddy-Enclosure-Laptop/dp/B002UZO07C/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1364839736&sr=8-2

It gives a direct connection to the HDD from the problem laptop and you can use it as a direct viewer to open up the files and folders exactly as you would see them on the laptop itself, but without the booting problems.. It's mainly meant as data recovery hardware for non-bootable systems. (this is why i bought something similar, to recover files)

It will connect directly to the drive via USB and without any other hardware connections which could possibly be interfering.. Plug it into a working laptop, find the drive and format it. Then using the new OS (the one that you want) on your flash drive, copy it onto the plugged in drive, install it and that should replace the old OS with the new one, then once the OS has been successfully installed, re-connect it to the laptop in it's original position and run as normal..

Managed to get it turned on and had a mess about, gave in to trying to boot of flash and mounted the image to a disk, opened bios and enabled f12 stuck disk in and clicked go lol the thing has been formatting since about half 7 last night and its on 18% it's only a pewny 80gb hdd that had nothing on it other than windows and avg! It's makin me thing that it was a bad file on it for it to be taking this long?

 

[rtorbs]

Bluescreen could be a hardware also.... I.e hard drive could be biffed so you could be trying to write to a damaged disk which may explain why it's taking so long

 

[Josh_R_32]

Well it did get kicked under the sofa a while back and left there til I moved house.. Probs explains everything lol the computer department at my work have said to fetch it in and they will replace everything inside and beef it up for free but I'm off work this week so wanted to see if I could get it workin myself

 

[rtorbs]

Well it did get kicked under the sofa a while back and left there til I moved house.. Probs explains everything lol the computer department at my work have said to fetch it in and they will replace everything inside and beef it up for free but I'm off work this week so wanted to see if I could get it workin myself

How old is it? It's it's anywhere near 3 years you'd be as well cutting your losses maybe and getting a new one..... most high Street will take your old as part ex and will price match plus newer generations of processors etc make them more efficient so win win

If you swap your HDD this week it could be something else failing next week

Just a thought

 

[Josh_R_32]

Oh it's old and I do have a new one I just want to get the thing runnin n put photoshop onto it so I'm not hoggin the mrs toys lol

 

[Josh_R_32]

And another thing is if puter head has a play with it it won't just be hdd that's changed it will basically be a new machine lol