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My computer has had a rough day :(

My HP with preinstalled XP (meaning I don't have the disk) decided to not work this morning, restarting itself right before it should have entered the Windows screen, making an endless restart loop.

Consulting with some knowledgable friends, I decided that since I really didn't have anything I needed on my harddrive, I would format the C partition and reinstall Windows with my dad's Windows XP disc.

The format went well, then while installing Windows I got all these errors about File Missing. I realized that my dad's XP disc was in fact a ME/98 Upgrade Disc. Oops :o

I shut down the computer and tried using system restore to no avail.

Whenever I start up with my Windows disk it wants to continue the installation (which will bring up a bunch of error messages). I tried to exit out of the installation with ESC and F8 but neither worked.

I am afraid I will have to buy a new harddrive (don't want to spend money) :(

Any ideas?

- Matt

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Download a win98 bootdisk frombootdisk.com.

Then put it on a floppy( or cd if you don't have a floppy drive). Boot off the floppy, at the A:\> prompt, type "fdisk", deleate all the partitions except the last one. It will be small. . This should wipe your HHD clean. Then run your restore disk again.

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Do you have the F10 partition? Tapping the F10 key after restarting should bring you into the recovery partition and be able to go to advanced and do a clean installation of XP.

After the format and install, done barebones, no added hardware.

Just mouse, keyboard monitor & tower. The way it came out of the box from the factory.

Then to get your drivers and software after installation of XP.

Should be in start- programs- HP- HP Tools- Applications- software and also hardware.

Should also be the option to make recovery CDs

What model number is this PC? If needing updated drivers- go to www.hp.com

click on update drivers & software- next page- put Pavilion ???? model number

next page choose XP and then will go to the drivers 7 software page.

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F10 after fdisk.

also you can use killdisk to write 0's to the drive. Be mindful of the second partition. You want to leave it as is.

After all is said and done, use your burning software to make an image. You could use this as a restore disk.

M

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No it doesn't matter using the 98 boot disk. It's just a good utilities to use to clean a hard drive. after you delete the partition. using your restore disk should be fine.

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One thing that you may not have thought of is that WinXP usually formats the disk NTFS file system and Win 98 is FAT32 file system. I don't think you can install 98 once it has been formatted NTFS

Not sure but a suggestion

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