Question..

[ftdsn244]

Hello,
My new laptop hard drive has took a dump. I currently cannot buy a new one right now, I have an old hard drive and a XP disc. If I reformat the HDD then do a clean install of xp on the HDD would it work? The laptop itself came with Windows 7 and has a win7 COA sticker on the bottom. Or would that not work because laptop came with win 7 already? Thanks

 

[geekapproved]

Sure it will work, but why would you install XP when you have Windows 7???

 

[ftdsn244]

I don't have a win 7 disc, I just read that some newer laptops won't be able to due to not having the right drives. Plus this is only a temporary thing for a month or two until I get another HDD and win 7 disc

 

[ftdsn244]

by the way my laptop did not come with a disc just a restore partition already in it which does not work at all

 

[buzznut]

by the way my laptop did not come with a disc just a restore partition already in it which does not work at all

Have you contacted the manufacturer? They can usually walk you through a restore/reinstall.

 

[ftdsn244]

I talked to them and did not offer to walk me through anything, said two option I can send it in or I can pay for a disc which who knows if that would even work on this HDD or new hard drive

 

[ftdsn244]

Just to let you know, this is what error message I am getting on the original HDD that came with laptop, will not get passed windows welcome screen then after running startup repair here is what i get


Problem Signature

Problem Event Name" Startup Repair Offline

Problem Signature 01: 6.1.7600.16385

Problem Sig. 02: 6.1.7600.16385

Problem Sig. 03: Unknown

Problem Sig. 04: -1

Problem Sig. 05: System Disk

Problem Sig. 06: 1

Problem Sig. 07: No OS Installed

OS version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1

Local ID: 1033

 

[buzznut]

A WIN7 install would be much preferable, especially in regards to driver support. For desktops its fairly easy to find drivers for chipset and wifi and whatnot but for laptops that's going to be more challenging.

WIN7 will have most of the drivers you need and will install them before you get into windows. Driver support for XP will be outdated.

But if you can't wait then you can Load XP on the current drive. It sounds like recovering files is not going to work. But just put the XP disc in and restart, and during post hit F8 or F11 to get to the boot menu, select boot from disc and install.

 

[buzznut]

Looks like your install got bricked. There's no OS installed but there is a OS version? Yeah, your OS is prolly still there it just can't boot because its broken.

Do you have another PC you could install the drive in? You could run a scan on the drive to check for errors and also recover some of your files.

 

[ftdsn244]

I would much rather just fix the new one but just cannot do it for a few more weeks, the disc are pretty expensive from what I seen at Best Buy and other computer stores nearby.

Yeah OS I believe is still there because when I made a win7 startup repair iso disc it found my OS and even when I clicked load drivers on the repair disc menu it showed me all my files and everything else to load.

 

[ftdsn244]

Yes I am on my old D620 right now. You want me to put the win7 HDD in this D620 and run the dskchk? I have tried this before but in the same laptop that it came in (lenovo) and it kept getting stuck at a certain partition saying this partition is unreadable or something like that. Would it help if I switched laptops then ran it again?

 

[iwih]

Hi,
You must be able to install windows XP. But, you may need to change the SATA mode to "IDE" from the BIOS configuration for some laptops. Also, there are laptops which are not compatible with XP.