hi everyone,can anybody help me please my daughter has a packard bell comp running xp home edition,when you boot it windows will not load ,not sure what they done,anyway decided to reinstall windows using disc,managed to refomat and load files then screen said that part of intall was succesfull and would reboot for rest of installation,comp shut down and rebooted but instead of continuing with install it started up again at bigining again waiting for prompt to format drive again ,can anyone help me please

take the cd out, restart and you should get a blue xp type of screen and a box saying insert the cd, put it in and press ok or retry or whatever it wants you to press

hope this helps, worked for me!
Mike

thanks tried that but when it started up it said insert boot diskette,found a floppy that came with her comp tried that which said win 98 but it got so far and said error 7 no hard drive,when she got comp it had win xp on it which she was given disc for and activation code this is why i tried installing from that

so, you have done a clean install, you have been past the blue screen with yellow bar?

and then it said you must restart your computer for setup to continue? (or similar)

.... try changing boot sequence in bios to HD first, then CD ROM

hi yes been past that screen and it said comp would reboot then continue with set up ,ill try what you said and see what happens,ill try tomorrow as been playing with this for hours thanks again ill let you know how i get on cheers

all i did was took the cd out to stop it booting from the cd and put it back in when it had half-booted

or, when you get the black screen saying press any key to boot from cd, just leave it, it should carry on booting (dont wait too long though because after a few mins your probably wasting your time)

Pardon me for jumping in here but this is confusing, there appears to be some conflicting information;

"... not sure what they done" Who is "they"?

"... decided to reinstall windows using disc" What disc?

"... found a floppy that came with her comp tried that which said win 98 but it got so far and said error 7 no hard drive.."

98 is a different animal. It most likely found no disk as the (current) disk is probably set up as NTFS. OR, the drive is not "seen" in the bios.

"... when she got comp it had win xp on it which she was given disc for and activation code this is why i tried installing from that"

This is an XP CD? Do you mean Product Key as opposed to "activation code"?

"all i did was took the cd out to stop it booting from the cd and put it back in when it had half-booted"

Where is the above from?

hi just booted into bios it says firstboot device floppy second boot device cdrom and third boot device disabled,the only choice you get for this drive is disabled ,floppy or cdrom,do you think problem lays there.
with reply to dan penny she got comp from friend,and them is her and her husband and yes meant product code sorry for being a bit green with imformation

first boot device = floppy
second boot device = cdrom
third boot device = disabled

"the only choice you get for this drive is disabled ,floppy or cdrom"

I take it you mean the third boot device. Ideally (for the third device) there should be a NETWORK or IDE0 or SCSI choice. Double check the first and second device options and look for one of these. (All three may have the same setting options from the sounds of things). Have you tried booting with the XP CD in the drive again?


See if you can set the boot device order to;
1 - IDE0
2 - CDROM
3 - Floppy or DISABLED

It should boot from the CD as long as there isn't a floppy in the drive and the hard disk does not have boot files.