Re install XP?

brooksie

Son has a laptop, had a problem , when he went to windows media player and it crashed the whole computer, restarted but wouldn't load XP. To cut a long story short he has tried to reinstall windows xp, which wouldn't work, so reinstalled old version of 98, then tried to upgrade etc etc, during setup it tried to partition disc then format that partition, gets to 46% then sticks again. He is now getting very cross, and frustrated that he can't reinstall windows. Any idea where he/we are going wrong..Thanks, sorry its a bit jumbled,

PaulK_3

You probably aren't going wrong but you may be facing either a hardware issue or a problem with the XP cd. Did the laptop come with XP or was it upgraded? It sounds as though you have a hard drive about to go south if it cannot complete the format, did you run a scandisk on it at all?

brooksie

The laptop came with XP, and have the recovery disc, which we couldn't get to work, which is why we went back to 98, formatted disc under 98, and installed 98, then went back to XP but thats when we encountered probs with formatting partition.Scandisk thru 98 didn't show anything.. 98 ran ok ish but if hard drive was on its way out would it show up on 98 install. Neither of us know what we are doing really, just advice from his friends(not sure whether it was good or bad!).

PaulK_3

XP is more conservative with it's approach to hardware, if it thinks it's going to have issues it won't complete the install a lot of the times. When you tried to use the restore CDs what happened?

brooksie

When it crashed, he switched it off, then switched back on, with only XP black screen, which wouldn't load, so put in disc which didn't do anything at all, so tried to format disc( his friends idea!!) and which wouldn't do that, so went back to windows 98 to format disc. Is it terminal.