My PC won't start properly

--_Adam_--_2

Good luck!

HereToday

It might sound a bit drastic at this stage, but I would consider getting another hard drive, swapping them over and installing Windows XP on it using your XP Professional recovery disc. That way you are up and running without worry of losing any of your data.

The thing that you have to is to ascertain wheteher you have an IDE drive or SATA. This can be determined from the model number of your HP PC.

You can get an IDE hard drive of the same size for as little as £5.57 here: ebay.co.uk/itm/Seagate-80GB-HDD-Internal-Hard-Drive-PATA-7200RPM-3-5-/130954020958?

SATA more, at £11.90 here: ebay.co.uk/itm/Seagate-80GB-Internal-Hard-Drive-SATA-5400RPM-2-5-/121148950500

Though of course I would recommend that you get a larger capacity hard drive.

Seagate 120GB IDE for £11.05 here: ebay.co.uk/itm/Seagate-120GB-HDD-Internal-Desktop-Hard-Drive-PATA-7200rpm-3-5-/130950962867

Samsung 120GB SATA for £15 here: ebay.co.uk/itm/Samsung-120GB-HDD-Internal-Hard-Drive-SATA-7200rpm-2-5-/111116943297

Often just a matter of swapping the cables over.

h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=uk&lc=en&dlc=en&docname=bph03429

square_bear

Thank you so much for all of your help so far.

I'm at work at the moment so cannot try the suggestions posted today.

Will update later.

waddler_8

square_bear wrote: »

Right, this is the message that I now have on the screen:


CHKDSK found and fixed one or ore errors on the volume.
80027764 kilobytes total disc space.
4360 kilobytes are available.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
20006941total allocation units on disk.
1090 allocation units available on disk.

C:\

waddler_8 wrote: »

Type exit and press enter then it should restart.

square_bear wrote: »

I now have a blue screen saying welcome to set up.

It's booting from the disk again, you need to remove it before re-starting.

square_bear

waddler_8 wrote: »

When you choose option 2, as well as "type EXIT and restart the computer", do you not see "which windows installation would you like to log on to"?

This is now on my screen. What do I need to do next, please?

waddler_8

Remove the CD, type exit, hit enter on your keyboard and let it reboot.

Hopefully windows should start.

square_bear

It will only let me enter the letter 'e' only.

waddler_8

Do you see that exact screen as above?

If so, press 1 and click enter. Then when the prompt reappears, type exit and press enter.

square_bear

I have a black screen with a blue stripe across the top with the words 'cmd.exe.
Then written in the box is:

Microoft Windows XP (Version 5.1.2600)
(C) copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft corp.
C:\Documents and settings\Wareham)

waddler_8

Press CTRL + ALT + DEL together - what happens?