WinXP Install problem.

[DanUK]

Hello.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Today, I am trying to do one of my friend's a favour to replace her Win98 with WinXP Home.

I brought her PC home, backed up all her data onto CD, then went into dos and used "format C:" which worked fine.

When I put the WinXP Home CD in, and boot from it, everything is fine until it hits the screen asking you to press Enter to install XP, "r" to repair, or some other to exit.
At this point, the keyboard is completely unresponsive. Pressing num lock will not toggle the light on or off. I tried resetting the BIOS to defaults, swapping the keyboard for another to no avail.

Any ideas on this please?

Thanks!

[PeOfEo]

When you reboot does it do the same thing? Also, you did not need to reformat in dos. The windows installer can do that for you.

[DanUK]

Hi there.
Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I have tried restarting multiple times and the same thing occurs...

[theuedimaster]

Okay, what you can basically do is totally wipe your hardrive clean. By that, I do not mean reformatting, but rather manually turning every 1 into a 0. Literally, you hd will be clean. I wrote a manual on this some time ago in another forum:

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=110826&highlight=darik%27s+boot+nuke

Tell me if it helps! Also, this will only work if you have a full-install of xp home, not an upgrade. Your computer will be nice, shiny, and new!

[Tecknoh]

Ya, setting the hard drive back to factory specs should do it. Get yourself a bootdisk. preferably windows 98. reboot. at the dos prompt, type fdisk

delete all hard drive partitions. now boot your win xp install disk and the installer will allow you to format the hard drive from win xp with the ntfs filesystem.

good luck

[PeOfEo]

Originally posted by theuedimaster
Okay, what you can basically do is totally wipe your hardrive clean. By that, I do not mean reformatting, but rather manually turning every 1 into a 0. Literally, you hd will be clean. I wrote a manual on this some time ago in another forum:

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=110826&highlight=darik%27s+boot+nuke

Tell me if it helps! Also, this will only work if you have a full-install of xp home, not an upgrade. Your computer will be nice, shiny, and new! That can be very time consuming depending on the size and speed of the drive, atleast that is what I have heard.

[theuedimaster]

Time Consuming - Yes

Work it - Yes

Basically, have it run all night, and in the morning, you can install windows.