[sw00t]

Hello! Just recently I tried to reboot my computer when it got stuck in a cycle of rebooting itself. Everytime I tried to start it it would take me to the screen asking if I wanted to boot with safemode, last known good configuration, etc. I tried booting in safemode, but it didn't work. I tried doing all of them but none of them were successful either. I decided it would probably be easier to just reinstall Windows and get a brand new start.
So I popped in my Windows XP disk, booted from the CD, and heres the tricky part. When I press "enter" to continue with the installation, a message in the bottom says , "Examining 190780 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi..." and stays there. I've had to reinstall windows before and I don't remember it ever getting stuck on this stage. Maybe I'm being impatient? But I left it on overnight to see if it was just a long process, but the computer still had it on in the morning. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again!

Matt

 

[OctanSenator]

Just fdisk and leave it with no format, boot your xp cd , if the disk is on a RAID controller make sure you have the latest driver ready and hit F6 to install it.

Fo rhelp on using fdisk, clicky clicky here: http://www.onecomputerguy.com/install/fdisk.htm

 

[sw00t]

Sorry if this sounds rather noobish, but how would I go about actually starting Fdisk? I've read via the command prompt, but I'm not exactly sure how to bring the cmd prompt up at this stage. Thanks

 

[OctanSenator]

Have a look at the link again and scroll down a bit to the Overview & Getting Started section, taht should help you.

 

[sw00t]

I've checked it out and haven't really found a solution.. The computer doesn't have a floppy drive, so I tried the CD option..burned the ISO file to a CD and tried to start it with that, but it just gives me a black screen on startup... Ahhh, not sure where to go from here.. Input is appreciated. Thanks

 

[OctanSenator]

Hmmm, kinda out of ideas i'm afraid, sorry that didn't work.

Hope someone else can be more of a help...

 

[valis]

sounds like you haven't either created a partition or formatted the disk. Have you done that yet?

 

[sw00t]

Nope, All I've done is tried reinstalling Windows, tried booting into various modes, and just recently tried the recovery mode. All of which have failed. I'm not exactly sure how I could do either of those things either. Thanks for the replies!

 

[valis]

try this:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm