The last time I was on here my son screwed up his PC and I have to wipe the hard drive and re-format.....PC Bruiser was excellent and walked me through the whole process.

NOW....my daughter is the culprit.

PC operating (or was) on XP. Turn it on...goes to the boot up screen that has the choices of Safe Mode, Last Good Config...etc. Choose anyone of them and it appear to be booting up....goes to the initial "Dell" screen then goes right back to the choices screen.

Please someone tell me what they think is wrong....do I have to wipe everything out again or what?

PLEASE HELP....PC Bruiser, if you have the time to deal with me again, I would greatly appreciate it.

Did that system come with a full XP installer CD or is it one of the OEM recovery types, that reformat the hard drive and reset the system to out of the factory condition? If the latter, we may not be able to fix this system either. We can't do much if the system simply won't boot.

I have the XP installer CD. I think my daughter said that she may have tried to use it but it didn't work.

Should I try?

Yes, it is our only choice if the system won't boot. We are going to do what is called an "In-Place" reinstall of XP. If it works, it will save all the software, settings and and data, although we will then need to figure out what is causing the underlying problems. Here's how to do it.

To do an "In-Place Reinstall" of Windows XP, follow these steps:

1. Insert the Windows XP Installer CD into your computer's CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, and then restart your computer.

2. When the "Press any key to boot from CD" message appears on the screen, press a key to start your computer from the Windows XP CD.

Note Your computer must be configured to start from the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive.

3. You will receive the following message on the Welcome to Setup screen that appears:

"This portion of the Setup program prepares Microsoft Windows XP to run on your computer:

To setup Windows XP now, press ENTER.

To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery Console, press R.

To quit Setup without installing Windows XP, press F3."

Press ENTER to set up Windows XP.

4. On the Windows XP Licensing Agreement screen, press F8 to agree to the license agreement.

5. This is a critical step, so be careful. Make sure that your current installation of Windows XP is selected in the box, and then press R to repair Windows XP. When the installer asks for your license key, use the one that came with your XP installer CD.

6. Follow the instructions that appear on the screen to reinstall Windows XP. After you repair Windows XP, you may have to reactivate your copy of Windows XP.

7. After the "In-Place Reinstall" completes, you will have to do all Windows Updates, reinstall your video card drivers, possibly your sound card drivers, and maybe a few other drivers as well.

If you follow the instructions exactly, you should not lose any data, software or most settings.

OK....I am going to try it now. I have set up her pc in here in my office so that it is close to mine...so I don't have to run up and down stairs...like I had to do with my son's the last time you helped me.

set up is copying files to installation folder....

pc is restarting...

going through the "installation" process.


BTW, will I have to reinstall the wireless internet card?

It appears that the computer has FROZEN.

Stopped during the installation process (33 minutes left). Noticed that it had not gone any further then that time and that the little thing on the bottom right side of the screen was no longer "moving".

Yikes....what should I do????

Restart the install. The XP installer usually keeps track of where it is, so that in the event of a freeze, it can start back at the right spot. If it can't do that, you can just start the procedure again from scratch.

If it freezes again, then we need to think about a hardware issue.

ok, doing it again. Will let you know if it freezes up again.

Ok...it looks like it is done. I think all of the data is lost though...including all the programs.

No Windows Office XP stuff....no icons on the screen and looked in programs for them...nada.

Do I need to reinstall all of them AND reinstall the wireless card?

Put in the CD for the wireless card but it still does not seem to be working.

I always seem to run into a problem when I have to reinstall them...ugh.

It is a Linksys router and I believe she has a G card. Is it a driver thing?

Yes, a driver issue. You might try downloading the latest drivers for her wireless card.

I think we should test the hard drive just to make sure it isn't failing. This kind of behavior often suggests a possible hard drive failure. If the hard drive is failing, the rest of installing everything will be a waste of time.

Here's how to do that. First, you need to determine what brand hard drive you have. Unless you happen to know that information, the easiest way to find out is simply to look at the drive itself, and the manufacturer's name will be on a label on the top of the drive. To do this, either check Device Manager or turn off your computer, unplug it from the wall and wait an hour. Then open the case and you should have a clear view of the hard drive. The manufacturer will be either:

Maxtor
Western Digital
Seagate
Hitachi (or IBM for older Hitachi drives)
Samsung

There are a couple of more minor manufacturers, but those are the "big-5" with over a 90% market share.

Once you know who made the drive, close the case and plug the system back into the wall.

Now, go to the manufacturer's web site. Under Downloads or Support, etc., you will find the manufacturer's hard drive diagnostics. You should find two versions, one that creates a bootable floppy, the other that creates a bootable CD. Pick one or the other, whichever is more convenient. Then create the bootable disk following the manufacturer's instructions, boot from the disk, and run the diagnostics - there are usually two of them, a Quick one and a much longer Complete one. Run the Quick one first, and if there are no errors, run the Complete one. It isn't necessary to run the Complete one if the Quick one shows errors. Post what you discover.

If you decide to download the CD version, that will be an iso file. To burn an .iso file, you need to use something like Nero, and do an image burn. If you do a regular burn the CD won't work. Alternatively, you can grab a free .iso burner here:

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

Watch the versions, v1 is for doing the burn on an XP SP1 system, v2 for XP SP2. After you download the file, right click on it, and choose Install from the context menu. That will install the .iso burner. You may need to reboot.

After that, navigate to the .iso file, right click on it and there will be a new context menu item called something like "Copy file to CD". Use that, and it will correctly burn the .iso file for you.

Then create the bootable disk following the manufacturer's instructions, boot from the disk, and run the diagnostics - there are usually two of them, a Quick one and a much longer Complete one. Run the Quick one first, and if there are no errors, run the Complete one. It isn't necessary to run the Complete one if the Quick one shows errors. Post what you discover.


Do you mean to just save it to a floppy?