laptop won't load

gjchester

johnmc wrote: »

When you go into BIOS there is an option to reboot on error. Uncheck it. This will tell you why it is rebooting. If you can't boot from the OS CD then it may be a registry problem. You will have to buddy the hard drive on another PC with the same FAT type and copy the default registry hives in, put the hard drive back and it should boot.Then do a system restore in Windows.

If you can't boot form the OS CD then the boot order is wrong, you have serious hardware faults (if it's both the HD and CD failing it's probably mobo related) or it's not an OS CD. It may be a recovery disk, but that should still boot, or it's a restore CD and you need a cd to start the process (HP always used to do a restore CDE that prepped the machine then an OS CD that installed the OS) first.

Trying to blindly swap reg hives in may work, but to be honest it's more chance of going wrong than right.

You never answered AlienRiks question, do you have any CD's that came with the michine, if you don't read the manual carefully, there may be a secret recovery partition you need to activate, but it sounds like your windows installation is stuffed and need restoring back to the factory defaults.

Ashok_2

gjchester wrote: »

If you can't boot form the OS CD then the boot order is wrong, you have serious hardware faults (if it's both the HD and CD failing it's probably mobo related) or it's not an OS CD. It may be a recovery disk, but that should still boot, or it's a restore CD and you need a cd to start the process (HP always used to do a restore CDE that prepped the machine then an OS CD that installed the OS) first.

Trying to blindly swap reg hives in may work, but to be honest it's more chance of going wrong than right.

You never answered AlienRiks question, do you have any CD's that came with the michine, if you don't read the manual carefully, there may be a secret recovery partition you need to activate, but it sounds like your windows installation is stuffed and need restoring back to the factory defaults.

I don't have any of the original cds apart from the windows one. I've changed the boot order from C drive first to hard drive, and vice versa but no luck. I've tried the original Windows CD and the stuff in codheadling's post above, but no luck with anything - the cds won't boot.