Need Immediate Help

fly747ie

ok guys,

i have a problem, my laptop went bananas awhile ago, so i decided to re-install the operating system. I couldnt find my original XP home edition CD, all i could find was an XP Pro SP2 cd, so i tried to install this instead, of course my product key under the laptop would not work with this,
Since then i have found my XP Home edition, but when i boot up my pc it still asks me for the XP Pro SP2 as it was in the middle of that installation.
I cant seem to do anything, my laptop justs starts and asks for that cd.

What can i do??

thanks in advance

KdjaCL

Boot from your Home edition Cd, in system bios set to boot from CD and let that set up run its course.


kdjac

fly747ie

i have tried that mate, i set my bios to cd and it goes to the half installed xp pro sp2 and then asks for that cd.
is there a way of deleting the half i installed and starting from scratch

Redisle

You could format the disc using dban
Just download and burn the iso to a disc, then boot the laptop from that. All the instructions are on the site anyway. then do a fresh install using the xphome disc.

Edit: You can also install this on a flash disk or floppy if it wont let you cant boot from cd

Villain

boot from the CD, but instead of going into installation mode, select the option to repair XP from the command prompt. From there, unhide, edit, then rehide the boot.ini

The boot.ini will have a reference to the setup, you need to edit to be like :

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

i

fly747ie

i dont get any options, it just jumps straight to finish my previous set up and it asks me to insert the XP Pro SP2 disk

Villain

Well then its not booting from the cd/dvd

fly747ie

i have it set up to boot from Cd, my BIOS is hardly screwed. is it possible to get to dos somehow

Villain

download a windows 98 bootdisk from the net

Ruu_Old

Bootdisk.com will have lots of options for you to try out.