Windows installation woes

[JimiP]

Hey everyone,

I'm having a little difficulty getting Windows XP Home installed on an uncles laptop. It's an HP Pavilion ZT1135. I know, it's pretty old. The problem I am having is that the laptop will not boot to an XP CD. I have two different CD's, both of them tried and true. One is a direct copy of the original XP Home SP2 disc while the other is a slipstreamed SP3 disc. When I try to boot to them I get the following message:

Boot CD-ROM Type: Non-Emulation Booting
CDBOOT: Couldn't find NTLDR

Now, thinking that this was simply a problem with my two CD's, I attempted to boot my retail Vista disc (at least so I could nuke the partition) but I get a "Couldn't find BOOTMGR" message. I had read somewhere that older laptops can have problems booting any bootable Windows CD that is SP2 or higher, that Microsoft had changed the way the CD's boot since SP1. I'm not sure whether that's true or not but anyway...

So the last thing I did was booted to KillDisk and nuked the drive. I am still getting the same boot messages. Anyone here know what could be causing these? Thanks in advance!

 

[davidrees]

Does it have a floppy disk drive?

If so, get a boot floppy with CDROM drivers, boot from floppy, format the drive, then copy the i386 folder to the hard drive and run WINNT

Worst case scenario, you could remove the drive from the laptop, hook it up to a desk top (probably need a little kit for that part), format, copy over the i386 folder and then stick it back in the laptop.

 

[JimiP]

Thank you for your response davidrees!

Unfortunately this laptop does not come with a FDD. Fortunately I do have the necessary equipment to hook the laptops HDD to my bench machine. But if I did reformat it that way and copy over the i386 folder, would I still have to wrestle with the whole NTLDR ordeal? Or is that the way I could get around that? Sorry if I seem a little out of it, been fiddling with this thing for a few hours now and it's getting late. If I didn't have other things to work on right now I'd be going insane.

 

[davidrees]

NTLDR is part of the boot section of the Windows XP CD.

It sounds like you made a slipstream CD that either you did not make a proper bootable CD or the laptop will not boot from your CD.

Since you said you can remove the drive, format it with FAT32 and make the drive bootable. A Windows 98 start disk can do this. It's been a while, but I seem to recall you can make that kind of disk using Windows XP - sorry, its been a long time.

Anyway, here are the steps: (back up your data, etc)

1. Move hard drive to a good PC and get it working
2. Format the hard drive with Fat32
3. "Sys" the hard drive and make it "DOS" bootable. Ideally you will have smartdisk (DOS disk caching) on there. Google "boot disk" and you will find some good options to do this stuff
4. Copy over the i386 folder to the laptop hard drive.
5. Put HD back in laptop
6. Boot laptop - it should boot to DOS from the hard drive if you did this right
7. Go to your i386 folder and run WINNT
8. When you install Windows, make sure you keep the existing volume - I know this is obvious, but don't try to format the disk holding your install files.
9. Recommended Optional: after you install Win XP, you can convert the drive to NTFS
10. Optional: Reinstall Crysis and let the gaming madness resume!

 

[JimiP]

Thanks for helping me through this one davidrees!

OK, so far this is what I've done. Last night I hooked up the HDD to my bench machine, initialized the drive and then formatted it to NTFS. After that I copied over the i386 folder from my SP3 slipstreamed CD (this CD has worked flawlessly on all of my other machines so I'm not sure why it wouldn't work here...) and then slipped it back into the laptop. I'm guessing (and by reading your latest post, I'm sure) that I've done this wrong because it didn't work. I'm going to try it step by step this time around. However, if you would could you elaborate on step #3 for me? Not quite sure what you mean by "sys" and when I looked up "boot disk" on google it was simply information overload as usual. Can't find an actual explanation on how to do it, only what it is and what it does. lol

Again, thanks for helping!

 

[JimiP]

3. "Sys" the hard drive and make it "DOS" bootable. Ideally you will have smartdisk (DOS disk caching) on there. Google "boot disk" and you will find some good options to do this stuff

Can anyone elaborate on this for me? I've searched google but I'm not finding out exactly how to do this.

 

[davidrees]

Sorry, this stuff goes back to the days when Win95 and Win95 were married to DOS.

There is a command in DOS and the later versions of DOS that came with Windows 9x. The "sys" command was used to install bootable files on a disk - either a floppy or a hard drive.

The command was "sys c:" or "sys a:"

You could also make a disk bootable during the format by entering "format a: /s" (IIRC)

The file is called "SYS.COM" (google around) Remember that there are now a lot of opensource/freeware/alternative versions of "DOS" so commands like this vary slightly in their behavior by version.

Go here http://www.bootdisk.com/popfiles.htm and you can get the boot disks you need and they explain how to use them.

Here are some more sites on bootdisks - it is worth understanding how to use them for situations such as yours and there are other times where it is useful.

http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/boot.htm
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Building-Using-Windows-XP-Boot-Disk.html

 

[JimiP]

I'll give this another try. Again, thanks for the help!

 

[ekoostik]

I know you're worried about step 3, but you might want to back up and take another look at step 2:

2. Format the hard drive with Fat32

What you said you did:

Last night I hooked up the HDD to my bench machine, initialized the drive and then formatted it to NTFS.

 

[davidrees]

Good catch.

You need Fat32 because you need the system to boot easily off the hard drive (using DOS) and it needs to be able to read the partition (DOS cant read NTFS).

 

[JimiP]

I know you're worried about step 3, but you might want to back up and take another look at step 2:


What you said you did:

Yeah, I realized that after the fact. I had formatted the HDD to NTFS before I read that I should format it to FAT32 instead. I haven't had the opportunity to try this out just yet but I'm hoping to be able to sometime today. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks!